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A fabliau (plural fabliaux) is a comic, often anonymous tale written by jongleurs in northeast France between ca. 1150 and 1400. They are generally characterized by sexual and scatological obscenity, and by a set of contrary attitudes—contrary to the church and to the nobility.〔Bloch (1986) ''Introduction'', p.11: "The scandal of the fabliaux--the excessiveness of their sexual and scatological obscenity, their anticlericalism, antifeminism, anticourtliness, the consistency with which they indulge the senses, whet the appetites (erotic, gastronomic, economic) and affirm what Bahktin identifies as the "celebration of lower body parts."〕 Several of them were reworked by Giovanni Boccaccio for the ''Decameron'' and by Geoffrey Chaucer for his ''Canterbury Tales''. Some 150 French fabliaux are extant, the number depending on how narrowly ''fabliau'' is defined. According to R. Howard Bloch, fabliaux are the first expression of literary realism in Europe.〔R. Howard Bloch, "Postface," in Rossi and Straub, 534.〕 Some nineteenth-century scholars, most notably Gaston Paris, argue that fabliaux originally come from the Orient and were brought to the West by returning crusaders 〔Nykrog, Per, ''Les Fabliaux'', Geneva: Droz, 1973, xx〕 ==History and definition of the genre== The fabliau is defined as a short narrative in (usually octosyllabic) verse, between 300 and 400 lines long,〔Cuddon 301.〕 its content often comic or satiric.〔Abrams 63.〕 In France, it flourished in the 12th and 13th centuries; in England, it was popular in the 14th century.〔 Fabliau is often compared to the later short story; Douglas Bush, longtime professor at Harvard University, called it "a short story broader than it is long."〔Qtd. in Abrams 63.〕 The fabliau is remarkable in that it seems to have no direct literary predecessor in the West, but was brought from the East by returning crusaders in the 12th century. The closest literary genre is the fable as found in Aesop "and its eastern origins or parallels," but it is less moral and less didactic than the fable.〔"Fabliaux," ''Encyclopædia Britannica'' 114.〕 Indeed, the word is a northern French diminutive from ''fable''.."〔 In terms of morality it is suggested to be closer to the novel than to the parable: "the story is the first thing, the moral the second, and the latter is never suffered to interfere with the former."〔 Still, according to Robert Lewis, "some two-thirds of the French fabliaux have an explicit moral attached to them."〔Lewis 241-42.〕 The earliest known fabliau is the anonymous ''Richeut''〔Matthews 424.〕 (ca. 1159-1175〔1159 in Cuddon 301; 1175 in "Fabliau, ''Merriam-Webster'' 399.〕); one of the earliest known writers of fabliaux is Rutebeuf, "the prototype of the jongleur of medieval literature."〔Hellman 142.〕 The genre has been quite influential: passages in longer medieval poems such as ''Le Roman de Renart'' as well as tales found in collections like Giovanni Boccaccio's ''Decamerone'' and Geoffrey Chaucer's ''Canterbury Tales'' have their origin in one or several fabliaux. When the fabliau gradually disappeared, at the beginning of the 16th century, it was replaced by the prose short story, which was greatly influenced by its predecessor.〔Balachov 30.〕 Famous French writers such as Molière, Jean de La Fontaine, and Voltaire owe much to the tradition of the fabliau.〔, vol. 11, 420-421〕 抄文引用元・出典: フリー百科事典『 ウィキペディア（Wikipedia）』 ■ウィキペディアで「fabliau」の詳細全文を読む スポンサード リンク
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