Encyclopedic Narration. Poetics of Knowledge in the Vernacular Novel of Late Medieval and Early Modern Period (14th to 16th Century)

本研究以14世纪至16世纪的一系列典范文本为基础，考察了中世纪晚期和现代早期白话小说中百科全书式叙事的形式和功能，以及它们的诗学方面。我们将百科全书式的叙事概念化为一种将百科全书知识融入到叙事中，同时适应和转换当时百科全书式知识的解释模式和方案的文学文体。随后，百科全书式的叙事被理解为一个启发式的概念，它定义了文学文本中的内容方面以及叙事结构的原则。在百科全书写作采用百科全书的做法和模式作为文学模式的程度上，它不同于更广泛地代表知识的叙事。其广泛的形式使白话小说倾向于涵盖中世纪晚期和现代早期的各种话语和各种跨学科知识。因此，该项目的重点是百科全书式叙事的隐含诗学问题，以及它是如何塑造白话小说的。我们的假设是：白话小说通过文学改编和百科全书式的内容和结构的转换，即通过去语境化和重新语境化当代知识话语，作为普遍知识的诗意载体和中介者而出现。在文学叙事的过程中，白话小说主张以新的、不同的方式建立这种知识的不稳定的统一性。因此，百科全书知识的重新情境化与重新配置同样的知识在形式和内容方面是齐头并进的。因此，这部小说确立了自己是一种能够批判性地反映、质疑甚至戏仿百科全书知识的文学体裁。我们的项目通过引入一种迄今被忽视的历史方法，以小说为典范体裁，增加了对文学与百科全书知识话语之间关系的研究。通过研究前现代小说中的知识结构和叙事结构之间的联系以及随后的转变过程(例如，文学世界的界定)，本项目有助于在前现代白话文学中形成一种历史的知识诗学。

Drawing on a series of paradigmatic texts from the 14th to 16th centuries, this research project examines the forms and functions of encyclopedic narration in the vernacular novel between the late medieval and the early modern period as well as their poetological aspects. We conceptualize encyclopedic narration in general as a literary style of writing that integrates encyclopedic knowledge into narrative, while at the same time adapting and transforming the interpretative models and schemes of the encyclopedic knowledge of the time. Subsequently, encyclopedic narration is understood as a heuristic concept that defines aspects of content as well as principles of narrative structure in literary texts. To the extent that encyclopedic writing adapts encyclopedic practices and models as literary patterns, it differs from narratives that represent knowledge more generally.Its extensive form predisposes the vernacular novel to encompass various discourses and a variety of interdisciplinary knowledge between the Late Middle Ages and the early modern period. Therefore, the focus of the project is on the question of implicit poetics of encyclopedic narration, and how it shapes the vernacular novel. Our hypothesis is this: the vernacular novel, by way of literary adaptation and the transformation of encyclopedic contents and structures, that is, by way of de-contextualizing as well as re-contextualizing contemporary discourses of knowledge, emerges as a poetic vehicle and mediator of universal knowledge. In the process of literary narration, the vernacular novel claims to establish the precarious unity of this knowledge in new and different ways. Re-contextualizing encyclopedic knowledge thus goes hand in hand with re-configuring this very same knowledge in terms of form as well as content. Thus, the novel establishes itself as a literary genre that is able to critically reflect, question, and even parody encyclopedic knowledge.Our project adds to already existing research on the relation between literature and discourses of encyclopedic knowledge by introducing a hitherto neglected historical approach that focuses on the macro-period between the Middle Ages and the early modern period, taking the novel as exemplary genre. By investigating the connection between configurations of knowledge and narrative structures in the premodern novel as well as the ensuing processes of transformation (e.g., defictionalization of literary worldmaking), this project contributes to the shaping of a historical poetics of knowledge in premodern vernacular literature.