Publisher's Synopsis
Structuralist narratology has largely developed its models and concepts on the basis of texts with hardly any features remaining from this origin. Pre-modern narration is much more strongly determined by the tension between orality and literacy. Codex culture often gave a text-internal form to functions of literary communication later realized as paratexts, which raises the question of how close to each other the categories of the author and the narrator figure can be brought. The book focuses on medieval epics and uses contemporary narrative theory to address the interplay of authorship, the authority of writing, and the staging of an originally imaginary relationship of oral communication.
