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Document Details : Title: 'Dat en is sonder reden niet' Subtitle: Over de zeven vragen van Seghelin van Jherusalem Author(s): CLAASSENS, G. Journal: Spiegel der Letteren Volume: 40 Issue: 1-2 Date: 1998 Pages: 25-54 DOI: 10.2143/SDL.40.1.632433 Abstract : After its publication in the 1878 edition, the fourteenth-century chivalric epic Seghelijn van Jherusalem has acquired a bad reputation in the field of research: the text lacks structure and coherence at the narrative level and is to be considered as a degenerate imitative effort. The present article rejects this characterisation, based as it is on the idealised aesthetic prejudices of Romanticism. This aesthetic is firmly Aristotelian in its causal determination and fails to do justice to medieval conceptions which favour meaning over form. By analysing a special, formally marked passage in the Seghelijn epic with specific intent on the work’s central thematic concern, this essay proposes to unveil the text’s interpretative perspective. This enables the reconstitution of unity and structural coherence at the level of menaning, an approach more properly attuned to medieval conceptions of literature. |
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