Purdue University Monographs in Romance Languages

This study views the pervasive ambiguity of Chretien''s romances as a positive quality and focuses on the techniques used in Yvain to encourage reflection. An adversative structure informs this romance, setting up a disconcerting rhythm of false belief and reversal which forces the reader/listener (like the hero) to question all that meets the eyes and ears. Grimbert''s discussion ranges broadly and authoritatively over subjects from narrative omniscience and reliability ... to character, to rhetoric and the duplicity of language”. Norris J. Lacy, French Review 63.2 (1989).