"In Shaping Romance, Matilda Bruckner examines a set of five twelfth-century romance texts - complete and fragmentary, canonical and now neglected, long and short - to map out the characteristics and boundaries of the genre in its formative period. Bruckner contends that, in the explosion of literary works that characterize the twelfth-century Renaissance, romance plays a particularly exuberant role, with its gift for experimentation in form and ideas and its taste for a wide array of materials combined through intergeneric mixing."--BOOK JACKET. "Bruckner is concerned not so much with the subject matter of romance - its narratives of knights and ladies, fantastic adventures, and erotic tests - as with the various ways in which it achieves narrative complexity: authorial stances and the meanings of signs frequently shift within the texts, as poems do, or do not, find closure. Through close readings and intertextual analysis, Bruckner explores patterns characteristic of romance writing: truth in the context of fiction, the interaction of formal shaping and semantic possibilities, closure as a constant play between the open and the closed."--BOOK JACKET. "Shaping Romance offers a perceptive and enlightening examination of "romance fictions" that crystallize some of the most brilliant moments of twelfth-century writing, including two versions of the Tristan story, as well as works by Chretien de Troyes and Marie de France. It will be of particular benefit to students and scholars of medieval literature."--BOOK JACKET.