The Knight Without Boundaries: Yiddish and German Arthurian Wigalois Adaptations

Erscheinungsjahr 2021
ISBN: 978-90-04-42547-7
Verlag: Brill

Buch, Englisch, Band 17, 190 Seiten, Format (B × H): 155 mm x 235 mm, Gewicht: 462 g

Reihe: Explorations in Medieval Culture

This volume explores a core medieval myth, the tale of an Arthurian knight called Wigalois, and the ways it connects the Yiddish-speaking Jews and the German-speaking non-Jews of the Holy Roman Empire. The German Wigalois / Viduvilt adaptations grow from a multistage process: a German text adapted into Yiddish adapted into German, creating adaptations actively shaped by a minority culture within a majority culture. The Knight without Boundaries examines five key moments in the Wigalois / Viduvilt tradition that highlight transitions between narratological and meta-narratological patterns and audiences of different religious-cultural or lingual background.

Autoren/Hrsg.

Oehme, Annegret

Fachgebiete

• Geisteswissenschaften Literaturwissenschaft Deutsche Literatur Jiddische Literatur
• Geisteswissenschaften Literaturwissenschaft Literaturgeschichte und Literaturkritik

Inhaltsverzeichnis

Acknowledgments

List of Figures

Introduction

1 Adapting Wigalois

2 The Return of Wigalois: Disentangling a Shared Tradition

3 A Tradition Revisited: Contemporary Research

4 The Knight without Boundaries: Reconnecting the Disentangled

1 From Arthurian Romance to Fairy Tale: Concepts of Adaptation in Ammenmährchen and Beyond

1 Retelling, Transforming, and Transferring Medieval Literature

2 Ammenmährchen as Adaptation

3 Storytelling within the Wigalois/Viduvilt Tradition

4 Conclusion

2 Wigalois: The Heterogeneous Hero and His Narrative World

1 God and Fortuna’s Chosen One

2 Between Heathendom and Sorcery

3 Intertextual Hero(in)es

4 Conclusion

3 Viduvilt: The Arthurian Knight Who Speaks Yiddish

1 Viduvilt’s Origins, Humor, and Alterations

2 Viduvilt as a “Jewish Text”

3 May God Send the Messiah: Religion and Religious Forces in Viduvilt

4 Knighthood and the Jewish Imagination

5 Knighthood in a Nutshell: The Sketch in Cod. Hebr. 255

6 Arthurian and Anti-Arthurian Adaptations

7 Conclusion

4 Language Matters: Crossing Linguistic and Ethnocultural Borders in a Seventeenth-Century Yiddish Textbook

1 Wagenseil’s Textbook: Mission, Audience, and Language Philosophy

2 Wagenseil’s Artis hof Adaptation as Transcultural Narrative

3 Wagenseil’s Artis hof as Translational Union

4 Adaptation and Power

5 Conclusion

5 An Arthurian Knight on the Chinese Imperial Throne: Navigating Divine Providence and Cosmopolitan Identity in Gabein (1788/1789)

1 Is That Yiddish?! Text and Edition of Gabein

2 Nowhere in Camelot: Abandoning the Arthurian Realm

3 Eastwards: Familiarity and Otherness in the Depiction of China

4 The Pious Hero

5 Gabein’s Prayers and Christian Theology

6 The Chinese Rites Controversy

7 A Jewish Cosmopolite?

8 Conclusion

Epilogue

Bibliography

Index

Über Autor(innen)

Annegret Oehme, Ph.D. (2016), is an Assistant Professor in the Department of German Studies at the University of Washington. She has published articles on pre-modern German and Yiddish literature in The German Quarterly, Ashkenaz, Daphnis, and Arthuriana, and a short monograph (“He Should Have Listened to His Wife.” The Construction of Women’s Roles in German and Yiddish Pre-modern Wigalois Adaptations [De Gruyter, 2020]).