4
culmination o f this bibliographic approach.8 There are also several works that have
dealt with specific areas o f Arthuriana, the most important o f which have been those
on the Grail by Juliette Wood (2000), Dhira B. Mahoney (2000), Barber (2004) and
John B. Marino (2004)9 by and on visual representations o f the legend by Whitaker
(1990), Debra N. Mancoff (1990) and Christine Poulson (1999).10 Kevin J. Harty,
meanwhile, has largely defined the study of ‘cinema Arthuriana’, a term o f his own
devising.11 In addition there have been a few studies of individual Arthurian writers,
including book-length studies by Charles Moorman (1960), Elisabeth Brewer (1993)
and David Llewellyn Dodds (1991, 1994).12 Shorter pieces, including articles and
book reviews, have been cited, where relevant, in the text.
The first large-scale work which surveyed post-medieval Arthurian literature
was M. W. MacCallum’s Tennyson’s ‘Idylls o f the King ’ and Arthurian Story from the
XVIth Century (1894), which pioneered a narrative of literary production from
Spenser to the Victorian period.13 His work concluded with several chapters on
Tennyson’s Idylls, which it understood to be the glorious culmination o f a tradition,
not just another retelling o f a medieval story - a sentiment repeated in later studies by
W.P. Ker (1896) and W. Lewis Jones (1911).14 MacCallum’s account o f post-
medieval literature was expanded by many critics, though none, until Margaret J.C.
Reid in 1938, took the story past Tennyson.15 Reid’s Arthurian Legend, a survey of
medieval and modem literature, included discussion of a number o f twentieth-century
writers, including Laurence Binyon, T.S. Eliot, Thomas Hardy, John Masefield, John
Cowper Powys and Edwin Arlington Robinson, as well as discussing otherwise-
neglected nineteenth-century figures including Mark Twain and Richard Wagner.
However, her treatment o f modem authors was brief and often negative.16
It was not until the publication o f Nathan Comfort Starr’s King Arthur Today
(1954), an analysis o f the legend from 1901 to 1953, that the study o f modem
I ^
Arthuriana began to acquire scholarly rigour. Starr structured his book thematically,
with chapters on Merlin, Tristram and Isoult, the Grail and so forth. While providing a
wide survey o f the field, Starr privileged certain writers - Edwin Arlington Robinson,
John Masefield, Charles Williams and T.H. White - believing them to be artistically
superior to their contemporaries. Starr also noted the influence o f scholarship on
creative writers (often neglected by later critics o f modem Arthuriana) and the
importance o f the Victorian poets in shaping early twentieth-century responses to
Arthur, while noting that ‘the outstanding twentieth-century versions break almost
completely’ with their forbears. So comprehensive was his book that it was not until
Beverly Taylor and Elisabeth Brewer published their Return o f King Arthur in 1983
that Starr’s work was superseded.18 Consisting o f synopses and commentary, Taylor
and Brewer’s study charted the early nineteenth-century revival, Tennyson and the
Victorians, twentieth-century dramatic and poetic treatments, as well as the later
developments in a variety o f novel subgenres. Their work also gave a substantial
amount of space to American retellings o f the legend, as Starr had earlier done.
Since the publication of Brewer and Taylor’s book, modem Arthuriana has
been a frequent source for studies. Raymond Thompson’s The Return from Avalon
(1985) concentrated exclusively on post-Second World War Arthurian fiction.19
Debra N. Mancoff published two collections of essays on modem Arthuriana in 1992
and 1998.20 Alan Lupack and Barabara Tepa Lupack published King Arthur in
America in 1999, the first work to be wholly concerned with American reinventions
of the tradition. And in 2002, Donald Hoffman and Elizabeth Sklar published a
collection of essays by predominantly American critics on Arthur and popular culture,
6
including chapters on Tintagel, King Arthur and Vietnam, adaptations for television
and comic-books.21
This study is indebted to many of these works, as my notes demonstrate. But it
also differs from them in a number o f ways. First, unlike the literary studies above,
this thesis attempts to integrate the exceptional scholarship the period produced into a
coherent narrative o f the Arthurian legend at this time. Second, unlike earlier accounts
of modem Arthuriana, which are all transatlantic studies (with the exception of King
Arthur in America), this thesis concentrates exclusively on literature produced within
the British Isles. The transatlantic bias o f earlier studies resulted in the neglect of
many writers whose work tended to exist outside of the Anglo-American parallels
most critics pursue.* This was especially true in the case o f non-English British
authors, such as T. Gwynn Jones, Glyn Jones, David Jones and Robert Morton Nance.
Indeed, reflecting the actual corpus of literature, much consideration is given to the
Cornish and Welsh ideological uses o f the Arthurian story in the twentieth century,
while I have also attempted to postulate on why Ireland and Scotland produced
relatively few works on the legend.
Apart from providing a counterbalance to the Anglocentricity o f previous
works, this study’s emphasis on the importance of the Celtic contribution to British
literary production also results in a change in the ways in which English writers, such
as John Masefield and T.H. White (both standard figures in studies o f modem
Arthuriana), can be viewed. Indeed, it is a central contention o f this thesis that from
the late 1920s to the mid 1940s Arthurian literary production in England steadily lost
the Anglocentricity o f its Victorian forbears and increasingly came to be written as an
* The trend for transatlantic studies may be something o f a historical accident, owing to the fact that
many of the scholars who have written on the modem Arthur have been Americans: Maynadier, Reid,
Starr, Mancoff, Thompson, Mahoney, Lupack, Tepa Lupack, Hoffman, Sklar and Marino. The very
first chronicler o f post-medieval Arthuriana, Mungo MacCallum, was an Australian professor at
Sydney University.
Dostları ilə paylaş: |