Women of Words in Le Morte Darthur

Women of Words in Le Morte Darthur PDF Author: Siobhán M. Wyatt
Publisher: Springer
ISBN: 3319342045
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 210

Get Book Here

Book Description
Offering a new reading of Malory’s famed text, Le Morte Darthur, this book provides the first full-length survey of the alterations Malory made to female characters in his source texts. Through detailed comparisons with both Old French and Middle English material, Siobhán M. Wyatt discusses how Malory radically altered his French and English source texts to create a gendered pattern in the reliability of speech, depicting female discourse as valuable and truthful. Malory’s authorial crafting indicates his preference for a certain “type” of female character: self-governing, opinionated, and strong. Simultaneously, the portrayal of this very readable “type” yields characterization. While late medieval court records indicate an increasingly negative attitude towards female speech and a tendency to punish vociferous women as “scolds,” Malory makes the words of chiding damsels constructive. While his contemporary writers suppress the powers of magical women, Malory empowers his enchantress characters; while the authors of his French source texts accentuate Guinevere’s flaws, Malory portrays her with sympathy.

Women of Words in Le Morte Darthur

Women of Words in Le Morte Darthur PDF Author: Siobhán M. Wyatt
Publisher: Springer
ISBN: 3319342045
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 210

Get Book Here

Book Description
Offering a new reading of Malory’s famed text, Le Morte Darthur, this book provides the first full-length survey of the alterations Malory made to female characters in his source texts. Through detailed comparisons with both Old French and Middle English material, Siobhán M. Wyatt discusses how Malory radically altered his French and English source texts to create a gendered pattern in the reliability of speech, depicting female discourse as valuable and truthful. Malory’s authorial crafting indicates his preference for a certain “type” of female character: self-governing, opinionated, and strong. Simultaneously, the portrayal of this very readable “type” yields characterization. While late medieval court records indicate an increasingly negative attitude towards female speech and a tendency to punish vociferous women as “scolds,” Malory makes the words of chiding damsels constructive. While his contemporary writers suppress the powers of magical women, Malory empowers his enchantress characters; while the authors of his French source texts accentuate Guinevere’s flaws, Malory portrays her with sympathy.

Gender and the Chivalric Community in Malory's Morte D'Arthur

Gender and the Chivalric Community in Malory's Morte D'Arthur PDF Author: Dorsey Armstrong
Publisher: Orange Grove Texts Plus
ISBN: 9781616101046
Category : Arthurian romances
Languages : en
Pages : 0

Get Book Here

Book Description
"A lively and thought-provoking study of gender in the Arthurian community. It is at once theoretically sophisticated and highly readable, full of insightful close readings yet conscious of larger patterns of analysis."--Laurie Finke, Kenyon College Gender and the Chivalric Community in Malory's Morte d'Arthur reveals, for the first time in a book-length study, how Thomas Malory's unique approach to gender identity in his revisions of earlier Arthurian works produces a text entirely unlike others in the canon of medieval romance. Armstrong argues that issues of masculine and feminine gender identity play more critical, central roles in Le Morte d'Arthur than they do in Malory's sources or other chivalric literature. Effectively merging contemporary gender and feminist criticism with careful analysis of Malory's sources, Armstrong uncovers how gender ideals established in the early pages of the text subsequently inspire and mediate the action of the narrative; moreover, her analysis shows how such ideals become progressively more divisive and destructive as Le Morte d'Arthur moves toward its inevitable conclusion. Recent articles and essays have shed much-needed light on various individual aspects of gender in Malory's text. However, only a sustained, book-length analysis like Armstrong's can fully articulate the relationships of gender to other chivalric ideals, such as mercy and martial prowess, that become increasingly complex as the narrative progresses. This study examines not only the most frequently read portions of the Morte but also those sections that often are regarded as extraneous to the primary narrative, such as the Tristram, Gareth, and Roman War episodes. By showing how gender operates in both the well-known and the less-appreciated portions of Malory's work, Gender and the Chivalric Community demonstrates that his text possesses far more narrative unity than previously thought. Armstrong provides a sophisticated yet accessible approach to the study of gender and its relation to other chivalric ideals in Le Morte d'Arthur, offering important insights for scholars and students of medieval romance, Malory, Arthurian literature, and gender and feminist criticism. Dorsey Armstrong is assistant professor of medieval literature at Purdue University. Her work has most recently appeared in Arizona Studies in the Middle Ages and the Renaissance and On Arthurian Women: Essays in Honor of Maureen Fries.

Women of the Morte Darthur

Women of the Morte Darthur PDF Author: Sir Thomas Malory
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Arthurian romances
Languages : en
Pages : 288

Get Book Here

Book Description


Arthurian Women

Arthurian Women PDF Author: Thelma S. Fenster
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1134817533
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 428

Get Book Here

Book Description
Featuring three original and 14 classic essays, this volume examines literary representations of women in Arthuriana and how women artists have viewed them. The essays discuss the female characters in Arthurian legend, medieval and modern readers of the legend, modern critics and the modern women writers who have recast the Arthurian inheritance, and finally women visual artists who have used the material of the Arthurian story. All the essays concentrate interpretation on a female creator and the work. This collection contains a useful bibliography of material devoted to female characters in Arthurian literature.

Disability and Knighthood in Malory’s Morte Darthur

Disability and Knighthood in Malory’s Morte Darthur PDF Author: Tory Pearman
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 0429818149
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 376

Get Book Here

Book Description
This book considers the representation of disability and knighthood in Malory’s Morte Darthur. The study asserts that Malory’s unique definition of knighthood, which emphasizes the unstable nature of the knight’s physical body and the body of chivalry to which he belongs, depends upon disability. As a result, a knight must perpetually oscillate between disability and ability in order to maintain his status. The knights’ movement between disability and ability is also essential to the project of Malory’s book, as well as its narrative structure, as it reflects the text’s fixation on and alternation between the wholeness and fragmentation of physical and social bodies. Disability in its many forms undergirds the book, helping to cohere the text’s multiple and sometimes disparate chapters into the "hoole book" that Malory envisions. The Morte, thus, construes disability as an as an ambiguous, even liminal state that threatens even as it shores up the cohesive notion of knighthood the text endorses.

Le Morte Darthur

Le Morte Darthur PDF Author: Sir Thomas Malory
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Arthurian romances
Languages : en
Pages : 560

Get Book Here

Book Description


On Arthurian Women

On Arthurian Women PDF Author: Maureen Fries
Publisher: Scripta Mercaturae
ISBN:
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 440

Get Book Here

Book Description
A collection of critical essays on female characters in Arthurian literature and biographical essays on women Arthurian scholars. Edited by Bonnie Wheeler and Fiona Tolhurst, literary inheritors of the feminist Arthurian legacy, these essays pay tribute to Maureen Fries, who played a ground-breaking role in re-examining traditional perceptions of the stories of King Arthur and his court as well as preconceptions about women scholars.

Malory's Morte D'Arthur

Malory's Morte D'Arthur PDF Author: C. Batt
Publisher: Springer
ISBN: 1137111836
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 283

Get Book Here

Book Description
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.

Forging Chivalric Communities in Malory’s Le Morte Darthur

Forging Chivalric Communities in Malory’s Le Morte Darthur PDF Author: K. Hodges
Publisher: Springer
ISBN: 1403979324
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 212

Get Book Here

Book Description
Forging Chivalric Communities in Marlory's Morte D'Arthur shows that Malory treats chivalry not as a static institution but as a dynamic, continually evolving ideal. Le Morte D'arthur is structured to trace how communities and individuals adapt or create chivalric codes for their own purposes; in turn, codes of chivalry shape groups and their customs. Knights' loyalties are torn not just between lords and lovers but also between the different codes of chivalry and between different communities. Women, too, choose among the different roles they are asked to play as queens, counsellors, and even quasi-knights.

Sir Thomas Malory's Morte Darthur

Sir Thomas Malory's Morte Darthur PDF Author: Sir Thomas Malory
Publisher: Parlor Press LLC
ISBN: 1602353840
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 1009

Get Book Here

Book Description
Dorsey Armstrong provides a new, Modern English translation of the MORTE DARTHUR that portrays the holistic and comprehensive unity of the text as a whole, as suggested by the structure of Caxton’s print, but that is based primarily on the Winchester Manuscript, which offers the most complete and accurate version of Malory’s narrative. This translation makes one of the most compelling and important texts in the Arthurian tradition easily accessible to everyone—from high school students to Arthurian scholars. In addition to the complete text, Armstrong includes an introduction that discusses Malory’s sources and the long-running debate surrounding the manuscript and print versions of the narrative. For ease of use, the text is keyed to both William Caxton’s print version and the manuscript version edited by Eugène Vinaver. A detailed index is also included.