Description
This book is an examination of the concept of Fortune in the narratives of the sixteenth-century German writer, Jrg Wickram. Wickram, often regarded as the founding father of the German prose novel, posited an internalisation of Fortune quite at odds with the ideas of both his contemporaries and predecessors. Throughout the Middles Ages, Fortune functioned as a representation of the experience of contingency and the human attempt to cope with it within the confines of a God-given order. The Renaissance saw the advent of the notion that an individual possessed the ability to control his or her life to a certain extent, but the perception of Fortune as an external force acting on human agents remained intact. Wickram, however, saw Fortune not only as an external force acting in conjunction with or competing with divine agency, but also as a force within the human mind.
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