Malory’s Morte Darthur
ISBN: 9781137111838
Platform/Publisher: SpringerLink / Palgrave Macmillan US
Digital rights: Users: unlimited; Printing: unlimited; Download: unlimited
Subjects: Palgrave Literature & Performing Arts Collection;

This study innovatively explores how Malory's Morte D'Arthur responds to available literary vernacular Arthurian traditions which the French defined as theoretical in impulse, the English as performative and experimental. Negotiating these influences, Malory transforms constructions of masculine heroism, especially in the presentation of Launcelot, and exposes the tensions and disillusions of the Arthurian project. The Morte poignantly conveys a desire for integrity in narrative and subject-matter, but at the same time tests literary conceptualizations of history, nationalism, gender and selfhood, and considers the failures of social and legal institutionalizations of violence, in a critique of literary form and of social order.

CATHERINE BATT is a Lecturer in the School of English, University of Leeds. She has articles on Clemence of Barking, the Gawain-Poet, Malory, Caxton, and V.S. Naipaul, and is editor of Essays on Thomas Hoccleve.

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