Erzählstrukturen der Artusliteratur: Forschungsgeschichte und neue Ansätze

The apparently vague and certainly hackneyed term 'structure' has become a terminally ubiquitous 'hardly perennial' in the research on Arthurian romance in verse and prose. Unlike orally derived epic poetry, early Arthurian romance already evolved an identity as an individually under-written, authorial, consciously fictional, and - in tendency at least - autonomous structure or 'conjointure' in its own right. Thus from the outset Arthurian research revolved around problems of form and in the course of its history attempted (not least under influence of the respectively prevalent research paradigms) to develop and/or draw on narrative models for the purpose of casting light on Arthurian structural regularities. The most famous instance of this is certainly the 'dual path theory', adumbrated by Wilhelm Kellermann, developing into a paradigm in post-mar research and justifying the positing of an 'Arthurian structure' (Hugo Kuhn). Looking back at the end of the 20th century on the various separate stages of Arthurian research, and exactly 50 years after the establishment of the International Arthurian Society, the German Section of the Society felt it incumbent upon itself to essay a stock-taking retrospect and combine a critical review of earlier research findings with an attempt at new approaches taking research on this subject on into the future.