From Sorcerer's Son to Epic Hero: (Meta)Poetic Entanglement in Walter of Châtillon's Alexandreis
Abstract
This is an accepted article with a DOI pre-assigned that is not yet published.
This article offers a new approach to Walter of Châtillon’s Alexandreis (ca.1175-1180). Whereas previous generations of scholars were largely focused on the internal meaning of the poem or its relation to the canon of Latin epic, this article also takes into account the position of the poem in its contemporary literary milieu. It argues that the poet makes use of metalepsis to reflect upon the position of his poem in the literary canon, but also to react to his contemporaries’ poetics. A metapoetical reading of the epic suggests that the poet self-consciously reflects on the position of the poem in the literary milieux of its time. Walter rejects the anachronizing approach that contemporary poems, such as the Old French Alexander Romance, adopt with regard to their antique materia, offering a historicizing model instead. Paradoxically, by embedding elements from the Romance-tradition into his narrative, Walter invites his audience to critically assess the value of classical history and epic poetry for a twelfth-century audience. Despite Walter’s classicizing tendencies, his work is firmly entangled within the literary landscape of the later twelfth century.
Keywords: epic poetry, multilingualism, translatio studii, metapoetry, classical reception