White's
Arthuriad, where supposed medieval harmony with nature is seen as an antidote to the destruction brought about by two world wars.
We are fortunate to be able to include "The Lost Letter: Seeking the Keys to Williams's
Arthuriad" in this issue.
Drawing evidence from three recent British poets, he reflects on incarnational witness and the way of images in Williams' (1886-1945)
Arthuriad, the poetics of testimony and historical redress in O'Siadhail (b.
Looking at the various uses of the sons' death--in Geoffrey's Historia regum, after the sons are killed by Constantine in a church, God metes out appropriate punishment and in later versions, generally speaking, good is divided from evil when the killings of the sons is unambiguously represented as justified--Kennedy traces the political and national implications of this
Arthuriad. The final essay in this section, Karen Cherewatuk's "Dying in Uncle Arthur's Arms and at his Hands," examines the alliterative Morte Arthure.
"[I]nstead," he complained, it "became a kind of American
Arthuriad." In later (and lesser) novels, McMurtry tells us, he "tried to subvert the Western myth with irony and parody with no better results)' He persists in this quest down to his latest novel, Telegraph Days (2006) and his latest history, Oh What a Slaughter: Massacres in the American West, 1846-1890 (2005).
I thought of Lonesome Dove as demythicizing, but instead it became a kind of American
Arthuriad, overflowing the bounds of genre in many curious ways.
By comparison with a similar compilation of Arthurian material, that of Micheau Gonot, who in 1470 also produced an
Arthuriad, for Jacques d'Armagnac, Duke of Nemours, Malory's enterprise leaves more room for the reader's intervention in the text.
It's true,however, that there is much in Lord Of The Rings that is indebted to the
Arthuriad, including Welsh versions of it.
The performative character of a promise in Malory's
Arthuriad is thus manifested not only in its capability of shaping the structure of the chivalric world but also in its involvement in character self-fashioning.
Continuing the verse tradition, he also foreshadowed the prose cycles in his ambition to produce a coherent
Arthuriad. Bogdanow shows that Robert attempted to integrate the Grail legend within a providential framework, to the extent of presenting Joseph and Merlin as analogues to the Old and New Testament, each separate yet mysteriously united ('et li dui seront la meisme chose').
7 See Mansus, 80-4 for Milton's intention to write an
Arthuriad.
King Arthur - a legendary king of the Britons (possibly based on a historical figure in the 6th century but the story has been retold too many times to be sure); said to have led the Knights of the Round Table at Camelot