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

本研究项目以14世纪至16世纪的一系列范例文本为基础，考察了中世纪晚期至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。我们将百科全书式叙事概括为一种将百科全书式知识融入叙事的文学写作风格，同时适应和改造当时百科全书式知识的解释模式和方案。随后，百科全书式叙事被理解为一种启发式概念，它定义了文学文本的内容方面和叙事结构原则。在某种程度上，百科全书式的写作适应了百科全书式的实践和模式作为文学模式，它不同于更普遍地代表知识的叙事。其广泛的形式使得白话小说包含了中世纪晚期和近代早期之间的各种话语和各种跨学科的知识。因此，本研究的重点是百科全书式叙述的隐式诗学问题，以及它如何塑造白话小说。我们的假设是：白话小说通过文学改编和百科全书式内容和结构的转变，即通过当代知识话语的去语境化和再语境化，成为普遍知识的诗意载体和媒介。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不稳定的统一。因此，重新语境化百科知识与重新配置同样的知识在形式和内容上是密切相关的。因此，小说确立了自己作为一种文学类型，能够批判性地反思，质疑，甚至模仿百科全书的知识。我们的项目通过引入一种迄今为止被忽视的历史方法，将重点放在中世纪和近代早期之间的宏观时期，以小说为范例，增加了对文学与百科全书式知识话语之间关系的现有研究。通过研究前现代小说中知识形态与叙事结构之间的联系，以及随后的转变过程（如文学世界建构的赤字化），本项目有助于塑造前现代白话文学中知识的历史诗学。

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.