Credit where credit is due: reassigning myths, forms, and origins in medieval French literature

This project engages with three origin myths within academia: the medieval text, legitimised through academic study;
medieval French studies, traced to the 19th century and to nationalism; and the original contribution to learning. I will
consider mediaeval literary forms in dialogue with 21st-century forms of myth made available in the Internet Age - comic
books, videogames, and fanfiction - to create models for understanding their genesis, impact, and socioeconomic
environments. I will trace cross-temporal participation in the construction and transmission of the material object of the
manuscript alongside the critical editions which have defined our engagement with them, and interrogate the complicated
dependency and contradiction of the myth's insistence upon the original. I am particularly interested in the phenomenon
of the unknown contributor, in the medieval text and across other disciplines, through material coding, inking, colouring,
narratology, and archiving. I will therefore be attentive to credit as a social, economic, and socioeconomic form of capital
which circulates in the construction of myth, allowing consideration of the power relationships defining the generation of
medieval French texts. What does it mean not to be credited? Understood as an absence of credit (rather than a form of
debt on a spectrum), could lack of credit act as an anti-capitalist, anti-monopolising force for the democratic occupation
of our myths?