Adventure and Love

The focus area "Adventure and Love" examines the complex relationship between the quest for adventure and the theme of love. This relationship was one of the defining structural features of ancient and medieval foundational texts and remained virulent in later eras. The obvious link between the emergence of a secularly oriented courtly literature around 1200 and the reassessment and refashioning of erotic love at the same point in history cements this constellation as a central point of interest for any research project that concerns itself with the adventurous storytelling. The narratological challenge of this research area lies in analysing the connection between the theme of love and narrative form, in understanding how the disruptive potential of erotic aspirations affects this form, especially as this potential is difficult to control within a narrative. As the tradition of adventurous narration demonstrates, this disruptive force also wields the power to produce compelling phantasms and fictions. The production of these phenomena is integral to the subject matter of any philology of adventure, as is the noticeably close connection between plots which revolve around love and certain problematic effects of the signifier, such as lying, seduction, disguise and masquerade.