3 - Authorship, Kinship and the Ethics of Continuation

Summary

Thus far I have deliberately set aside in-depth discussion of the authors of our cycle. This has allowed consideration of the whole corpus as a coherent and self-sufficient textual body; by stripping away the literary capital that has accrued (or failed to accrue) to the cycle's various authors, Chrétien's contribution could be considered on an equal footing with that of the continu-ators, offering an alternative to the overwhelming critical tendency to study the corpus through the specific lens of Chrétien scholarship. Nevertheless, as Matilda Bruckner reminds us, romance intertextuality can be understood as ‘a dynamic play operating between anonymous and named authors’. At moments in the Conte du Graal cycle, the figure of the author bursts into the textual frame to claim responsibility for the words being transmitted; at other times, the play of authorial communication can be tracked through the analysis of certain particularly suggestive semantic fields.