Tyler Tichelaar's King Arthur's Children

There is an extended post on Tyler Tichelaar's recent book Arthur's Children: A Study in Fiction and Tradition (Modern History Press, 2011) at our affiliate blog Researching the Villains of the Matter of Britain.

New from Arthuriana 20.4

The latest number of Arthuriana 20.4 (Winter 2010) includes the following articles of interest:

Parke Godwin and the Lessons of History
Roberta Davidson

Authors of historical fiction claim that their work restores a narrative of meaning to the past, and that it recovers the experiences of those individuals or groups who have been excluded from the formal historical record. This two-fold function is particularly important to Parke Godwin, who suggests that, to recreate the past, the storyteller must be willing both to utilize and to go against the historical record. He positions himself as a kind of ‘pagan,’ resurrecting an older, more ‘authentic’ world to which he postulates Arthur belonged.

Playing with Gender in Arthur, King of Time and Space
Christina Francis

By developing characters with unstable and changeable sex identification, Paul Gadzikowski creates an Arthurian world with fluid gender boundaries in his webcomic Arthur, King of Time and Space. The effect of this fluidity is a cast of Arthurian characters that continuously confronts sex and gender stereotypes, inviting audiences to reconsider their own assumptions about sex and gender.

Daniel Mangrané and Carlos Serrano de Osma's Spanish Parsifal (1951): a Strange Film?
Juan Miguel Zarandona

The Spanish cinematic work entitled Parsifal (1951) has always been termed ‘strange’ and regarded as an artistic failure. However, reconsideration of the context in which this film was produced suggests it is worthy of greater attention. After considering the difficult history of Spanish cinema, General Franco’s Spain, local legends of the Grail, and the Wagnerian cult in Barcelona, we can see that Parsifal is a very interesting interpretation of the story of the Arthurian knight.

Articles can also be accessed through Project MUSE.