Reinventing King Arthur

In her systematic reassessment of the remaking of the Arthurian past in nineteenth-century British fiction and non-fiction, Inga Bryden examines the Victorian Arthurian revival as a cultural phenomenon, offering insights into the relationship between social, cultural, religious, and ethnographic debates of the period and a wide range of texts. Throughout, she adopts an intertextual and historical perspective, informed by poststructuralist thinking, to reveal nineteenth-century attitudes towards the past. Starting with a review of the historical evidence available to Victorian writers and an examination of how historians of the time represented Arthur, the author connects Victorian accounts of Arthur's quest to contemporary scientific and historical searches for origins and knowledge, and to his appropriation by competing religious movements. She shows how writers explored the dynamics of heroism by recruiting Arthur and his knights to define codes of chivalric service, and to personify the psychological complexities of love. Finally, the legend of his death and transportation to Avalon is deconstructed and placed in the context of cultural attitudes towards commemorating the dead and theological debates about the afterlife. Inga Bryden engages not only with well-known Arthurian texts by Tennyson, Swinburne, Morris and Rossetti, but with lesser-known works by Bulwer-Lytton, Robert Stephen Hawker, Sebastian Evans, Diana Maria Mulock, Christiana Douglas and Joseph Shorthouse.

The Arthurian legend closes with a promise: On a distant day, when his country calls, the king will return. His lost realm will be regained, and his shattered dream of an ideal world will, at last, be realized. This collection of original essays explores the issue of return in the modern Arthurian legend. With an Introduction by noted scholar Raymond H. Thompson and 13 essays by authors from the fields of literature, art history, film history, and folklore, this collection reveals the flexibility of the legend. Just as the modern legend takes the form current to its generation, the myth of return generates a new legend with each telling. As these authors show, return can come in the form of a noble king or a Caribbean immigrant, with the mystery of an art theft or a dying boy's dream.

The revival of interest in Arthurian legend in the 19th century was a remarkable phenomenon, apparently at odds with the spirit of the age. Tennyson was widely criticised for his choice of a medieval topic; yet The Idylls of the Kingwere accepted as the national epic, and a flood of lesser works was inspired by them, on both sides of the Atlantic. Elisabeth Brewer and Beverly Taylor survey the course of Arthurian literature from 1800 to the present day, and give an account of all the major English and American contributions. Some of the works are well-known, but there are also a host of names which will be new to most readers, and some surprises, such as J. Comyns Carr's King Arthur, rightly ignored as a text, but a piece oftheatrical history, for Sir Henry Irving played King Arthur, Ellen Terry was Guinevere, Arthur Sullivan wrote the music, and Burne-Jones designed the sets. The Arthurian works of the Pre-Raphaelites are discussed at length, as are the poemsof Edward Arlington Robinson, John Masefield and Charles Williams. Other writers have used the legends as part of a wider cultural consciousness: The Waste Land, David Jones's In Parenthesis and The Anathemata, and the echoes ofTristan and Iseult in Finnigan's Wake are discussed in this context. Novels on Arthurian themes are given their due place, from the satirical scenes of Thomas Love Peacock's The Misfortunes of Elphin and Mark Twain's A Connecticut Yankee at King Arthur's Court to T.H. White's serio-comic The Once and Future King and the many recent novelists who have turned away from the chivalric Arthur to depict him as a Dark Age ruler. The Return of King Arthurincludes a bibliography of British and American creative writing relating to the Arthurian legends from 1800 to the present day.

King Arthur in America analyzes the tremendous appeal of the Arthurian legends in America by examining the ways that Americans have found to democratize the Matter of Britain and to incorporate aspects of it not only into America's own mythologies but also into literature, film, social history, and popular culture.

Wrapped in the mists of Avalon since the Middle Ages, the Once and Future King made his promised return in the nineteenth century. The Return of King Arthur: The Legend through Victorian Eyes celebrates the unprecedented revival of the Arthurian legend in the arts and popular culture of Victorian Britain (1837-1901). In a rich array of poetry, painting, children's stories, and plays, Arthur and his noble knights and ladies were reborn. The legend was not simply revived: the new generation reinvented the saga and its heroes in their own image, creating metaphors for their notions of monarchy, the roles of men and women in society, and the proper path for children to follow. In The Return of King Arthur, Debra N. Mancoff reveals why the legend resonated so deeply during Victoria's reign. Retold in the poetry of Alfred, Lord Tennyson, William Morris, and Sir Walter Scott, and envisioned in the paintings of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood and in book illustrations by such artists as Arthur Rackham and Aubrey Beardsley, the legend of King Arthur and his compatriots in chivalry became the code for every facet of Victorian culture. Informative and entertaining, and handsomely illustrated with more than 130 evocative and heroic works of art, The Return of King Arthur captures the romance of this age-old legend and shows us how the Victorian words and images have shaped our own great interest in it today.

"King Arthur in history and legend" by William Lewis Jones. Published by Good Press. Good Press publishes a wide range of titles that encompasses every genre. From well-known classics & literary fiction and non-fiction to forgotten−or yet undiscovered gems−of world literature, we issue the books that need to be read. Each Good Press edition has been meticulously edited and formatted to boost readability for all e-readers and devices. Our goal is to produce eBooks that are user-friendly and accessible to everyone in a high-quality digital format.

"...[T]race[s] . . . the origin and growth of King Arthur's historical and literary renown" --Preface.

Offer an overview and a number of examinations of Arthur's fortunes. This work reveals the role of Fortune itself, often personified and consistently instrumental, in accounts of Arthur's court and reign. It traces the trajectory of the Arthurian legend, and follows the turning of Fortune's wheel, emphasizing the flourishing of the legend.

Examining the origins of the Arthurian legend and major trends in the portrayal of Arthur from the Middle Ages to the present, this collection focuses on discussion of literature written in English, French, Latin, and German. Its 16 essays, four published here for the first time, deal with such matters as the search for the historical Arthur; the depiction of Arthur in the romances Erec and Iwein of Hartmann von Aue; the way Arthur is depicted in 19th-century art and the Victorian view of manhood; and conceptions of King Arthur in 20th-century literature. Six of the essays, originally published in French and German, are translated into English especially for this book. Two essays have been substantially revised. An introduction offers a general discussion of the development of the legends in the countries of Europe. Works discussed include medieval and Renaissance chronicles (Geoffrey of Monmouth's Historia Regum Britanniae, Wace's Roman de Brut, Polydore Vergil's Anglica Historia, Scottish vernacular and Latin chronicles), medieval romances (the Lancelot en prose, the Mort Artu, the Post-Vulgate Roman du Graal, and works of Chrétien de Troyes, Hartmann von Aue, and Sir Thomas Malory), Spenser's Faerie Queene, Tennyson's Idylls of the King, and T.H. White's Once and Future King. A bibliography lists selected major secondary studies of King Arthur as well as major reference works.

Provides information on the actual life of King Arthur along with the development of the legends that surround his life.