klasyki: Fabliau

Evidence: 100 • authority: 72

A fabliau (French pronunciation: [fabljo]; plural fabliaux) is a comic, often anonymous tale written by jongleurs and clerics in France between c. 1150 and 1400. They are generally characterized by sexual and scatological obscenity, and by a set of contrary attitudes generally critical or mocking of the church and nobility. While most fabliaux were anonymous, some authors like Jean Bodel or Guèrin, who wrote during the peak of the genre's popularity, are known. Several of them were reworked by Giovanni Boccaccio for the Decameron and by Geoffrey Chaucer for The Canterbury Tales. Some 150 French fabliaux are extant, the number depending on how narrowly fabliau is defined. According to R. How…

Evidence: — • authority: 72

Elegiac comedy was a genre of medieval Latin literature—or drama—represented by about twenty texts written in the 12th and 13th centuries in the liberal arts schools of west central France (roughly the Loire Valley). Though commonly identified in manuscripts as comoedia, modern scholars often reject their status as comedy. Unlike Classical comedy, they were written in elegiac couplets. Denying their true comedic nature, Edmond Faral called them Latin fabliaux, after the later Old French fabliaux, and Ian Thomson labelled them Latin comic tales. Other scholars have invented terms like verse tales, rhymed monologues, epic comedies, and Horatian comedies to describe them. The Latin "comedies",…

Evidence: — • authority: 72

Donatien Alphonse François de Sade, best known as the Marquis de Sade, was a French aristocrat, revolutionary and author of philosophical and sadomasochistic novels exploring such controversial subjects as rape, bestiality and necrophilia. His works evidence a philosophical mind advocating a materialist philosophy in which Nature dictates absolute freedom, unrestrained by morality, religion or law, with the pursuit of personal pleasure as its foremost principle. Besides novels, he wrote philosophical tracts, novellas, short stories, and a number of plays (many of which are no longer extant). Publication, dissemination, and translation of his works have long been hindered by censorship: not…