Fear. An Emotive Script in Middle Dutch Chivalric Romance (1250-1350).

In today's society, we can observe a growing societal problem with the emotion 'fear' and a tendency of increased attention to emotions in general. Within academia, the 1980's paradigm shift towards a view on emotions as culturally contingent has sparked the 'affective turn' across the humanities, including literary historical studies. This project turns to the literary imagination in the medieval period, and seeks to examine how the emotion of fear is shaped within Middle Dutch chivalric romance (1250-1350). For this purpose, it will draw on the recently developed concept of 'emotive scripts.' This theoretical framework suggests that texts have an underlying script which functions as a literary blueprint for shaping emotionality, and which prescribes certain rules for emotional behaviour. To decipher the 'scripting' of fear, this project will focus on three aspects: (1) emotive staging and representations, (2) character-specific patterns, and (3) intra-textual social conceptions. Via cross-cultural comparisons, this project will investigate how the script of the Middle Dutch romances relates to that of other medieval literary traditions, but it will also investigate whether an overarching script emerges within the Middle Dutch tradition, or whether traces of divergence can be observed.

Keywords:MIDDLE DUTCH LITERATURE

Disciplines:Comparative literature studies, Literatures in Dutch, Medieval literature, Stylistics and textual analysis, Psychology of literature

Project type:Collaboration project