New Book: Arthurian Legend in the Twentieth and Twenty-first Centuries

New collection out now:

Arthurian Legend in the Twentieth and Twenty-first Centuries

Full details: https://vernonpress.com/book/1011 (plus intro and index)

Susan L. Austin (Ed.)

With contributions by Sarah Gordon (Utah State University), Carl Sell (Lock Haven University of Pennsylvania), Tracey Thomas (York University), Susan L. Austin (Landmark College), Zainah Usman (Tarrant Country College Northwest), Adrienne Major (Landmark College), Erin Mullally (Le Moyne College), Leah Hamilton (Xavier University)

Hardback $61 

Availability: In stock

also in E-book $ 75 , Paperback $ 48




SUMMARY

The King Arthur we imagine did not exist in history. He is the result of stories told and retold, changed and added to by storytellers for centuries, each making the story reflect the storyteller’s time and values.

The chapters in this book look at movies, manga, comic books, a television show, and traditional books released since 1960 to explore some of the ways King Arthur has been reimagined in the past 60 years. Interpreting Avalon High and The Kid Who Would Be King, Camelot 3000 and King Arthur vs. Dracula, Fate/Zero, John Steinbeck’s The Acts of King Arthur and His Noble Knights, the influence of Arthurian legend on Harry Potter, Terry Gilliam’s The Fisher King, John Boorman’s Excalibur, Jerry Zucker’s First Knight, Antoine Fuqua’s King Arthur, Guy Ritchie’s King Arthur: The Legend of the Sword, Matthew Vaughn’s Kingsman: The Secret Service, Iris Murdoch’s The Time of the Angels, and the BBC series Merlin, the authors find that while we are still interested in the idea of King Arthur, we may also want his story to be more racially and gender inclusive, less elitist, and in some cases, more secular.




TABLE OF CONTENTS

Introduction

Chapter 1
Kids and kings: postmodern nostalgia and youthful Arthurian cinematic retellings
Sarah Gordon
Utah State University

Chapter 2
Camelot 3000 and Dracula vs. King Arthur: The uses of limited-run comics as updates of the Arthurian legend for contemporary readers
Carl Sell
Lock Haven University of Pennsylvania

Chapter 3
The fate of Artoria: contextually exploring gender, character, and conflict in Fate/Zero
Tracey Thomas
York University

Chapter 4
Gender and class in John Steinbeck’s The Acts of King Arthur and His Noble Knights
Susan L. Austin
Landmark College

Chapter 5
A kid wizard in King Arthur’s court
Zainah Usman
Tarrant County College Northwest

Chapter 6
Chivalry and ambition in Terry Gilliam’s The Fisher King
Susan L. Austin
Landmark College

Chapter 7
Democratic dreams and the death of Arthur, king
Adrienne Major
Landmark College

Chapter 8
Killing Arthur: revising the Perceval myth in “Kingsman: The Secret Service”
Erin Mullally
Le Moyne College

Chapter 9
The death of the Fisher King in Iris Murdoch’s The Time of the Angels
Susan L. Austin
Landmark College

Chapter 10
When Arthurian heroes fall: adapting moral failure and Christian redemption in the BBC’s Merlin
Leah Hamilton
Xavier University

Index


EDITOR BIOGRAPHY


Susan Austin has worked at Landmark College, Vermont, for over a decade. There, she pursues her research interests, which include film adaptations of literature and modern and contemporary fiction. She teaches a course that uses Arthurian and related materials as sources for analysis and synthesis essays, and then sends students off to research and write about related topics in literature, history, archaeology, science, and popular culture. She holds an MA in English Literature from the University of Massachusetts at Amherst. Associate Professor Austin has presented several papers at the Northeastern Modern Language Association Conference in the last decade and she has chaired five sessions, one of which is the basis for this volume.

Guest Post: Mediavilla on The Camelot Rising Trilogy, Books 1 and 2

 

White, Kiersten. The Guinevere Deception.  Delacorte Press, 2019. The Camelot Rising Trilogy 1. 339 pages. Hardcover: $18.99, ISBN: 9780525581673. Paperback: $10.99, ISBN: 9780525581703.

 

 - - -. The Camelot Betrayal. Delacorte Press, 2020. The Camelot Rising Trilogy 2. 370 pages. Hardcover: $18.99, ISBN: 9780525581710. 

 

Guinevere is 16 years old when she marries Arthur, two years her senior. Though they have never met, the king welcomes her with open arms while the people of Camelot look on and cheer. Still, nothing is as it seems. As soon becomes apparent, theirs is merely a marriage of convenience arranged by Arthur’s mentor, Merlin, who was banished from Camelot many years before. Instead of a “real wife,” Guinevere, who has magical powers of her own, was sent by Merlin to protect the king from his enemies. Instead of saving Arthur, however, Guinevere is, more often than not, the one needing rescue as she foolishly follows her misguided impulses into danger in hopes of foiling threats against the king. Coming to her aid is usually Arthur’s older nephew Mordred, an enigmatic character for whom the queen finds herself having inexplicable feelings.

 

In a recent online bookstore event, bestselling author Kiersten White proclaimed that, because every Arthurian writer adds his or her own spin to the legend, there no longer is an Arthurian “canon.” Indeed, she herself takes every opportunity to shatter tradition by introducing unexpected plot elements. The Tristan-Isolde-Mark love triangle, for instance, is depicted here as a secret romance between Isolde and her handmaid Brangien. Likewise, Lancelot, the queen’s knight, is eventually revealed to be a woman, who may or may not be in love with Guinevere. As for Arthur, before marrying the queen, he had a short-lived affair with Elaine, the sister of Maleagant, who kidnaps Guinevere to avenge Elaine’s death during childbirth. The names may be the same, but White obviously takes pleasure in adding her own special twist to an age-old saga.

 

Although both books are written in third-person, all action is seen and interpreted (often wrongly) through Guinevere’s naïve eyes. One might think the point here is to view the usually male-dominated story through a strong feminist lens. But with Arthur constantly gone, managing the business of Camelot, Guinevere is mostly left to her own ill-conceived devices that usually lead to trouble. Instead of an intelligent, masterful heroine, the reader is left with a young, inexperienced queen who listens to her heart more than she does common sense—resulting, not surprisingly, in yet another abduction at the end of the second book, setting the scene for the trilogy’s third volume, The Excalibur Curse, due to be published in 2021.

 

Lots of unanswered questions one hopes will be resolved by the end of book #3: Who exactly is Guinevere? Is Merlin good or evil? Which side is Mordred on? And will Arthur and the queen finally consummate their marriage? Recommended for young adults who are unfamiliar with the traditional Arthurian story.

 

 

Cindy Mediavilla

 

Cindy Mediavilla is a retired public librarian who has collected, read and written about Arthurian fiction for more than 40 years. Her publications include Arthurian Fiction: An Annotated Bibliography (Scarecrow Press, 1999), "From 'Unthinking Stereotype' to Fearless Antagonist: The Evolution of Morgan le Fay on Television" (Arthuriana 25:1), and an article on Arthurian romance in Encyclopedia of Romance Fiction (2018). Cindy's MLS and PhD are from UCLA, where she also taught as a lecturer for 16 years.

 

Guest Post: Dan Nastali Reviews By Force Alone

Tidhar, Lavie. By Force Alone. Tor/Tom Doherty Books, 2020. 416 pages, $27.99. ISBN: 9781250753458.

This is a dark fantasy novel that retells the traditional Arthurian story, from Uther Pendragon’s taking the kingship of Britain to Arthur’s final battle at Camlann, with incidents and characters drawn from a wide range of medieval sources. Here you will find new treatments of the familiar figures at every turn, but unless your tastes run to the grim and gory, you may have some difficulty digesting this version. The story is set in a post-Roman Britain more fully conceived than that of most Dark Age historical and fantasy novels, and the action shifts, not always smoothly, between the natural and supernatural worlds. Both offer more than a little gratuitous ugliness in the form of mutilation, murder, cannibalism, general bad behavior and rather too much excrement.

The McGuffin in this story is the grail—here a skystone or UFO that fell to earth in Uther’s reign and which somehow became both the source of gold and radioactive mutations, but that’s just one of many original takes. The sword in the stone, the Lady in the Lake, the Questing Beast, the Green Knight, even Glastonbury Well are given new and typically perverted twists, because this is not a novel that loves the tradition. It is basically a series of incidents hung on the bare bones of the legend. Britain and Fairyland coexist uneasily here. Londinium, the setting for much of the early story, is a mess of Roman remains, crime-ridden slums and mob-ruled trades—a sordid, cheerless place. The castles of the other world are not much better.

Arthur, when we meet him (and who never develops much distinctive character) leads a teenage protection racket and a round table of petty thieves and drug dealers before taking charge of the city and dealing with rival kings. Merlin, the offspring of a human and some unidentified unhuman, is a major figure throughout, but one whose powers and motives are never well-defined or of great consequence. The same is true of other supernatural creatures—Nimue, Morgause, Morgan, Cath Palug—who interfere with the mere mortals apparently by whim.

Guinevere is here a leader of a girl gang, Sir Kay the obligatory gay, Owain and Agravain are thugs, and so on. Lancelot has perhaps the most developed character through an elaborate back story which has him serving his master, Joseph of Arimathea, but there is little that distinguishes even Lancelot as a distinct personality. The dialogue of all of them, as well as the voice of the narrator, is in the naughtiness mode of teenage boys. The obscenities are so plentiful that any shock value has been wrung out of them by chapter two, so thereafter there’s little effect at all.

Tidhar is a cut above the writers of most modern fantasy in his descriptive abilities and understanding of the historical background of his tale, and he is a writer of solid prose. He incorporates, often unobtrusively, allusions not only to obscure medieval material, but also to Greek and Roman philosophers, Biblical writing and early Christian apocrypha, and even, if you’re attentive, to T.S. Eliot and Kurt Vonnegut. The book has its admirers—the back of the jacket is covered in favorable quotes—and when the writing is good, I tend to become a slow reader. I’m also always interested in new treatments of the legend, but with By Force Alone, I found myself rushing to its end.

Dan Nastali

Independent scholar

Kansas City, MO