Emanuel Mickel

Emanuel Mickel

Professor Emeritus, French

Education

  • Ph.D., French Language and Literature, University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill, 1965
  • M.A., Romance Languages, University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill, 1961
  • B.A., French and History, Louisiana State University, 1959

Research areas

  • Medieval Romance
  • The Rose
  • Allegory and persona in European literature
  • 19th-century literature
  • Classic tradition
  • Ekphrastic writings and painting

About Emanuel Mickel

My research has been in both Medieval French literature, especially the twelfth and thirteenth century, and in nineteenth-century literature and painting. I have written widely in both periods, including books on poetry, Fromentin, and Jules Verne in the nineteenth century, and volumes on Marie de France, the Chanson de Roland and The Old French Crusade Cycle. Articles on Gautier, Stendhal, Merimée, Baudelaire, Zola, Huysmans, Fromentin, Barbey d’Aurevilly and French painting highlight my work in the later period; works on the Jeu d’Adam, Tristan en Prose, Chrétien de Troyes, the Chanson de Roland, Aucassin et Nicolette, Marie de France, and the verse romance-history known as The Old French Crusade Cycle represent the Middle Ages.

In recent years I have focused on the manuscript work, historical study, and romance analysis necessary for the edition of the ten-volume Old French Crusade Cycle. I am now engaged in a study of the linking of allegory, persona, and personification in the formation of western European literature. In terms of the Middle Ages this should lead to a study of the Roman de la Rose.

Selected publications

Books

  • The Old French Crusade Cycle. Volumes 1-10. Co-editor with Professor Jan Nelson. University of Alabama Press, 1977-2003.
  • Enfances Godefroi and Le Retour de Cornumarant. Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 1999.
  • Ganelon Treason and the Chanson de Roland. University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1989.

Articles

  • “The Satirical Tradition in Aucassin et Nicolette” Romance Philology 62 (2008): 1-21.
  • “The Shadow of Oedipus in the Tristan en Prose” Medievalia 25 (2004): 1–23.
  • “Mercury’s Philologia and Erec’s Enide” Romance Philology 56 (2002): 1–22.
  • Enfances Godefroi: The Making of Popular History” Romania 116 (1998): 148-69.
  • “Transmission and Transformation: Uses of Textual Expression” in Kaleidoscope, ed. Graham Falconer and Mary Donaldson Evans. Toronto: Centre d’Etudes Romaniques (1996): 111-30.
  • “The Manuscripts of the Old French Crusade Cycle” Romania 115 (1997): 434-50.
  • “Inclination mondaine, trahison et impiété, ou les germes de la culpabilité dans la littérature médiévale” Travaux de Littérature 8 (1995): 25-41.

Courses taught

  • A Question of Love - classic foundations of European literature
  • Nineteenth-Century Painting and Literature
  • Nineteenth-Century Novel
  • Seminar on the Roman de la Rose

Honors, fellowships, & awards

  • NEH Awards, 1980-83; 1984-86
  • Lilly Open Fellowship, 1981-82
  • Chevalier dans l’Ordre des Palmes Académiques, 1997
  • Visiting Scholar, Pembroke College, University of Cambridge, Fall 2006
  • The Reception and Transmission of the Works of Marie de France, 2003 (Book written in honor of my work on Marie de France)