title: Rise Supernatural Fiction 1762-1800 (Cambridge Studies in Romanticism)
author: Clery
description: "A careful, detailed study of the transformation and persistence of the supernatural across the period into an age of skepticism and empiricism....Clery draws a great deal of evidence, from the theater, from drama criticism, and from contemporary accounts of Mary Toft and the Cock Lane ghost, evidence that is carefully marshaled and thoroughly interpreted." Studies in English Literature<br /><br />"Clery's is one of the best books on the novel in the Romantic period which I have recently read. Altogether, Clery's book is a landmark." Romanticism
zlib_text: CLIGES: A ROMANCE
  1
  CLIGES: A ROMANCE
  by Chretien de Troyes, trans. L. J. Gardiner.
  
  CLIGES: A ROMANCE
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  INTRODUCTION
  IT is six hundred and fifty years since Chretien de Troyes wrote his
  Cliges. And yet he is wonderfully near us, whereas he is separated by a
  great gulf from the rude trouveres of the Chansons de Gestes and from the
  Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, which was still dragging out its weary length in
  his early days. Chretien is as refined, as civilised, as composite as we are
  ourselves; his ladies are as full of whims, impulses, sudden reserves, self-
  debate as M. Paul Bourget's heroines; while the problems of conscience
  and of emotion which confront them are as complex as those presented on
  the modern stage. Indeed, there is no break between the Breton romance
  and the psychological-analytical novel of our own day.
  Whence comes this amazing modernity and complexity? From many
  sources:--Provencal love-lore, Oriental subtlety, and Celtic mysticism--all
  blended by that marvellous dexteri