Narcissism and Selfhood in Medieval French Literature

This book offers analyses of texts from medieval France influenced by Ovid’s myth of Narcissus including the Lay of Narcissus , Alain de Lille’s Plaint of Nature , René d’Anjou’s Love-Smitten Heart , Chrétien de Troyes’s Story of the Grail and Guillaume de Machaut’s Fountain of Love . Together, these texts form a corpus exploring human selfhood as wounded and undone by desire. Emerging in the twelfth century in Western Europe, this discourse of the wounded self has survived with ever-increasing