The subject of the study is the dream as a literary motif in narrative literature of the Middle Ages. The narrative techniques of dream stories in different genres of the epic will be explored. On the basis of a framework of basic criteria this study detects narrative patterns and determines where they originate in the texts, on what they depend and how they are designed for each story. The analysis gains new insights in how the dream is related to dream images. It is also studied how the dream is connected with different literary genres in which it appears, and with the specific text in which it is inserted as a motif. The study thus provides cross-genre, genera-, and text-specific results concerning the techniques of the narration of dreams.

Autorentext
Dr. Benjamin van Well ist seit 2013 DAAD-Lektor an der Peking University.