Legendarisches Erzählen in Legendensammlungen des Mittelalters und der Moderne: Transformationen eines Faszinationstyps und seiner textuellen Repräsentation

Authors : Matthias Standke

Pages : 1-27

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Publication Date : 2021-06-24

Article Type : Research

Abstract :This article deals constructively with a study on historical narratology by Harald Haferland, which he presented to a broad audience of experts at the Germanistentag in Bayreuth in 2016. In it, Haferland outlines pre-modern narrative as modular or episodic and characterized by a strikingly fragile space-time continuum compared to modern narrative. The analyses that follow take up these ideas and try them out on a specific type of narrative, the legendary narrative in legend collections. In their narratological peculiarities, both vernacular legends of a medieval legendary, the Der Heiligen Leben, and legends of modern legend collections are examined. Specifically, the Middle High German Antonius legend and the Margarethen legend are examined and compared with 19th- and 20th-century versions. In addition to the exemplary analysis of the Antonius legend and the legend of St. Catherine, the legend of a modern martyr, Alois Grozde, is also focused on. Moreover, the narration of a modern legend collection designed for children is additionally analyzed. It turns out that the differential features of pre-modern and modern storytelling observed by Haferland also apply to this Gumbrechtian type of fascination, but the differences do not merge into a transformation of the storytelling. Rather, modern legend collections exhibit a different form of textual representation, one that is descriptive rather than narrative. It seems that modern legends are perceived less as narratives that create meaning, and more as informative descriptions.
Keywords : Historic narratology, legendary narrative, legend collections, modernity, premodernity