L'autre du meme

The Roman de Perceforest is the longest known text from the Middle Ages. It describes the life of Arthur's pre-Christian ancestors and knights, presenting them as descendants of Alexander the Great. Throughout the work, a genuine poetics of repetition takes place: the Perceforest author references older texts, integrating sometimes entire parts, such as passages of the Vulgate Cycle and the Prose Tristan. Furthermore, the narrative reproduces some of its own sequences in different places of the text. The present study considers the impact of this aesthetics of repetition on the literary genre, on its construction as well as on the reader's reception. The book lays the foundation of a theory of borrowing and discusses it with regards to contemporary fiction theories and reader-response criticism. -- From publisher's website.