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Creole Medievalism: Colonial France and Joseph Bédier's Middle Ages

Online ISBN:
9781452946498
Print ISBN:
9780816665259
Publisher:
University of Minnesota Press
Book

Creole Medievalism: Colonial France and Joseph Bédier's Middle Ages

Michelle R. Warren
Michelle R. Warren
Professor of comparative literature, Dartmouth College
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Published:
19 January 2011
Online ISBN:
9781452946498
Print ISBN:
9780816665259
Publisher:
University of Minnesota Press

Abstract

Joseph Bédier (1864–1938) was one of the most famous scholars of his day. He held prestigious posts and lectured throughout Europe and the United States, an activity unusual for an academic of his time. A scholar of the French Middle Ages, he translated Tristan and Isolde as well as France’s national epic, The Song of Roland. Bédier was publicly committed to French hegemony, yet he hailed from a culture that belied this ideal—the island of Réunion in the southern Indian Ocean. This book demonstrates that Bédier’s relationship to this multicultural and economically peripheral colony motivates his nationalism in complex ways. Simultaneously proud of his French heritage and nostalgic for the island, Bédier defends French sovereignty based on an ambivalent resistance to his creole culture. The book shows that in the early twentieth century, influential intellectuals from Réunion helped define the new genre of the “colonial novel,” adopting a pro-colonial spirit that shaped both medieval and Francophone studies.

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