CONGRESS CANCELED Arthurian Literature between Malory and Tennyson

Medieval Institute, Western Michigan University

Description

The four centuries between William Caxton’s publication of Sir Thomas Malory’s Morte d’Arthur (1485) and the completion of Alfred Lord Tennyson’s cycle of twelve narrative Arthurian poems, the Idylls of the King (1885), tend to be regarded as ‘an Arthurian nadir’ for English-language Arthurian literature. This panel seeks to foster an exploration of the portrayal of King Arthur within the corpus of ‘lesser’ Arthuriana. Our aim is to promote interest in these oft-forgotten texts and to explore how these treatments of Arthur illuminate post-medieval reception of the history and literature of the Middle Ages more broadly. David F. Johnson

 
May 9th, 1:30 PM

CONGRESS CANCELED Arthurian Literature between Malory and Tennyson

Schneider 1145

The four centuries between William Caxton’s publication of Sir Thomas Malory’s Morte d’Arthur (1485) and the completion of Alfred Lord Tennyson’s cycle of twelve narrative Arthurian poems, the Idylls of the King (1885), tend to be regarded as ‘an Arthurian nadir’ for English-language Arthurian literature. This panel seeks to foster an exploration of the portrayal of King Arthur within the corpus of ‘lesser’ Arthuriana. Our aim is to promote interest in these oft-forgotten texts and to explore how these treatments of Arthur illuminate post-medieval reception of the history and literature of the Middle Ages more broadly. David F. Johnson