The question of fabliau origins continues to attract critical attention, but remains significantly unresolved. Before 1895, when Joseph Bédier published Les Fabliaux: études de littérature populaire et d'histoire littéraire du moyen age, researchers in comparative folklore studies had already traced the temporally and geographically remote ancestry of the plots of a number of individual Old French fabliaux. ... Interest has shifted to the related but conceptually different problem of the immediate sources of inspiration of the fabliaux, to a concern with the emergence of the fabliau genre as a phenomenon unique to thirteenth-century French culture. ... researchers have attempted to define the nature and account for the appearance of a distinctive fabliau discourse, sufficiently universal to be constitutive, and common to fabliaux derived from historically diverse sources. This shift in perspective reduces the significance of plot, and plays down the fabliau’s association with the world of international folktale. It creates an opportunity to privilege different features of the genre’s form, and to promote the importance of different literary affiliations. Two well-known contributions to fabliau scholarship which exploit these possibilities are particularly relevant to the present discussion. Bédier himself, concentrating on aspects of style and tone, saw the fabliaux as an expression of bourgeois realism and l‘esprit gaulois. He associated them with the Roman de Renart ...

Language: English

DOI: 10.2307/43629285