| Recognized as the first medieval instances of the romance genre, the Roman de Thebes, Roman d'Eneas, Roman de Brut and Roman de Troie (ca. 1150-1165) are based on the rewriting of Latin texts deeply rooted in history. Yet few studies have explored the relationship between these romans d'antiquite and medieval historiography, as a literary genre (estoire and historia). There has indeed been a tendency amongst critics to focus on a thematic analysis of the links between the "first romances" and history, at the expense of a more generic approach. Our task, therefore, is to show that this corpus can be defined by its conscious -- and subversive -- relationship with medieval historiography. By combining the Jaussian approach of the theory of genres with the methods of "New Philology", we shall first establish that the medieval readers interpreted romans d'antiquite not only as romance, but also as works of historiography. This double interpretation, confirmed on various accounts by the manuscripts, will then be explained by a poetic structure that playfully blurs the line between generic distinctions. Hence it will appear that the "first novelist" deliberately use the conventions of historiography in order to lay the foundation of a genre that will maintain a close, yet complicated, relationship with history. |
