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Philip Bennett's research is particularly focused
on the Old French epic, particularly the Guillaume Cycle,
on which he has recently published one book (a study
of La Chanson de Guillaume and La Prise
d'Orange ), of which a critical bibliography will
soon be appearing. Another book considering the cycle
in the light of the socio-cultural and anthropological
theories of M. Bakhtin and G. Dumézil is in progress.
He also has
a strong interest in romance, particularly the Tristan
legend and in thirteenth-century non-Arthurian romance,
in late medieval lyrico-narrative texts and the ways
in which poetic and narratorial personae are generated.
The intertextual relationships between these various
genres in their different periods and historiographic
or hagiographic texts is also a central issue of his
work, with particular reference to the creation of heroic
character, the boundaries of fiction and truth or reality,
the role of mythology, legend and folklore in creating
the ideologies and literary universes of the works concerned.
His interest
in the texts is based especially on questions of poetic
and narrative structures and rhetoric (anchored always
in the text as language), with textual analysis and
edition and manuscript studies as essential disciplines
providing a necessary foundation for any theoretical
investigations.
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