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What does the word "quest" conjure up? A journey in the hope of fulfillment, an exploration of identities, questions, the nature of research itself, or the darker side of quest in the form of conquest, colonisation and displacement? These are some of the threads taken up and developed in this collection of essays by established and emerging scholars. Germaine Greer, Italo Calvino, Umberto Eco, Serge Doubrovsky, A. S. Byatt, Novalis, Melville, Valéry, Beckett, Stanislao Nievo, Victor Segalen, Sibilla Aleramo, Dacia Maraini, Defoe, Tournier, Coetzee, Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz, Cintio Vitier, Domingo del Monte, Ramón de Palma, Pablo Armando Fernández, Hubert Aquin, Anne Hébert , Homer, Proust, Balzac and Robbe-Grillet provide the literary voices that invite these scholars to embark on their own quests into subjects as diverse as the relationships between texts, authors and readers, the initiatic journey, spirituality and enlightenment, female autobiography and identity, oppression, imperialism and postcolonial discourses, not to mention the history of the quest itself. The result is a rich tapestry of thought-provoking insights into the inexhaustible connections between literature and quest.

Quests (Expeditions) in literature.

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Reisbeschrijvingen --- Quests (Expeditions) in literature

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Het verslag van de jonge Amerikaanse journalist Henry Morton Stanley (1841-1904) van zijn zoektocht in het hart van Afrika naar de Engelse ontdekkingsreiziger David Livingstone (1813-1873), die al enige tijd spoorloos verdwenen was.

Explorers --- Stanley, Henry Morton --- Livingstone, David --- Quests (Expeditions) in literature

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"Offers the first full study of the allegorical knightly quest tradition from the Middle Ages to the Renaissance. Richly satisfying, as impressive in the detail of its scholarship as in the elegance of its critical formulations. It seamlessly moves between different literary traditions and across conventional period boundaries. In Dr Nievergelt's treatment of this theme, the successive retellings of the tale of the knight's quest come to stand as an emblem of shifting values and norms, both religious and worldly; and of our repeated failures to realise those ideals." Dr Alex Davis, Department of English, University of St Andrews. The literary motif of the "allegorical knightly quest" appears repeatedly in the literature of the late medieval/early modern period, notably in Spenser, but has hitherto been little examined. Here, in his examination of a number of sixteenth-century English allegorical-chivalric quest narratives, focussing on Spenser's 'Faerie Queene' but including important, lesser-known works such as Stephen Bateman's 'Travayled Pylgrime' and William Goodyear's 'Voyage of the Wandering Knight', the author argues that the tradition begins with the French writer Guillaume de Deguileville. His seminal 'Pèlerinage de la vie humaine' was composed c.1331-1355; it was widely adapted, translated, rewritten and printed over the next centuries. Dr Nievergelt goes on to demonstrate how this essentially "medieval" literary form could be adapted to articulate reflections on changing patterns of identity, society and religion during the early modern period; and how it becomes a vehicle of self-exploration and self-fashioning during a period of profound cultural crisis. Dr Marco Nievergelt is Lecturer (Maître Assitant) and SNF (Swiss National Science Foundation) Research Fellow in the English Department at the Université de Lausanne.

Quests (Expeditions) in literature. --- English literature --- Quests in literature --- History and criticism.

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La Queste del Saint Graal is one of the best-known and most important of the medieval Grail Romances, being the first text to portray the character of Galahad the «perfect» knight, and the earliest extant version of the tale to attempt to fuse the dual tradition associated with the Grail: pseudo-Celtic and Christian. However, it is often considered a difficult text, containing passages of dense metaphor and a seemingly disjointed plot. This study explains the link between metaphor and structure within the text, by means of detailed analysis of certain key sections of the narrative, showing how the author has carefully constructed a hierarchy of characters. What also emerges is that the author places the reader in a position analogous to that of the questing knights, struggling to understand the adventures with which they are presented, and able to do so insofar as they have grasped the symbolic significance of earlier events in the story. The literary technique of structuring a text by means of metaphor is employed not only in La Queste del Saint Graal, but is characteristic of much medieval narrative: thus this analysis has implications for the interpretation of other examples of the genre.

Grail --- Arthurian romances --- Knights and knighthood in literature. --- Quests (Expeditions) in literature.