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Generally speaking, scholars of Malory's Morte Darthur have given Guenevere bad press. Terms like 'shrew' and 'virago' have been often applied, while her agency has been largely ignored or minimized. Recently, however, scholars have begun to reconsider her characterization and even her agency. Analysis of her response to Meleagant's attempted raptus, however, has been minimal; likewise minimal has been discussion of her response to Lancelot both with respect to Meleagant and to Lancelot's late and apparently marital desire. Both men become wholly subject to Guenevere's subtle but masterful agency. [DTH, JR.]. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this article, the author mentions that Arthurian scholarship has neglected to examine how depictions of Queen Guinevere as a nun in Great Britain in the mid-nineteenth and early twentieth centuries served to undercut negative archetypes associated with her. It mentions that Scholars, most notably Debra N. Mancoff, Stephanie L. Barczewski, and Clare Broome-Saunders, have widely examined the nuances and the importance of this depiction of the Arthurian queen.

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The article presents a literary criticism for "Le Morte d'Arthur" a reworking by Thomas Malory of existing tales about the legendary King Arthur, Guinevere, Lancelot, Merlin, and the Knights of the Round Table. It reports that Malory interpreted existing French and English stories about these figures and adds original material.

Manuscript sources for Edward MacDowell's Sonata Eroica (1895) divulge a radically different, notably more sinister program than the commentary that the composer imparted to Lawrence Gilman, his first biographer. Gilman's widely promulgated account, merely comprising four character sketches based on Tennyson's Arthurian epic, Idylls of the King, maintains that the score's movements respectively depict the coming of Arthur, Doré's engraving of a knight surrounded by elves, MacDowell's idea of Guinevere, and the passing of Arthur.Inscriptions in a continuity draft preserved at the Library of Congress, however, reveal that the first movement was initially conceived as an independent ballade (an intrinsically programmatic genre) and was originally inspired by Tennyson's portrayal of Vivien seducing Merlin. Another inscription discloses that MacDowell envisioned the third movement as Lancelot's adulterous serenade to Guinevere. Additional manuscript variants and close correlations between the score's vibrant musical topics and Tennyson's literary contexts demonstrate that the entire sonata, including the elfin scherzo and war-like finale, embodies a tale of seduction and its dire consequences.Although the Eroica's vivid, newly discovered program remains compatible with MacDowell's professed aesthetics, he suppressed the inscriptions. Speculative reasons for his doing so include formal considerations, critical opinions on programmaticism, and his attitudes toward sex. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]