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An interdisciplinary and trans-historical investigation of the representation of ethics in Arthurian Literature.From its earliest days, the Arthurian legend has been preoccupied with questions of good kingship, the behaviours of a ruling class, and their effects on communities, societies, and nations, both locally and in imperial and colonizing contexts. Ethical considerations inform and are informed by local anxieties tied to questions of power and identity, especially where leadership, service, and governance are concerned; they provide a framework for understanding how the texts operate as didactic and critical tools of these subjects.This book brings together chapters drawing on English, Welsh, German, Dutch, French, and Norse iterations of the Arthurian legend, and bridging premodern and modern temporalities, to investigate the representation of ethics in Arthurian literature across interdisciplinary and transhistorical lines. They engage a variety of methodologies, including gender, critical race theory, philology, literature and the law, translation theory, game studies, comparative, critical, and close reading, and modern editorial and authorial practices. Texts interrogated range from Culhwch and Olwen to Parzival, Roman van Walewein, Tristrams Saga, Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, and Malory's Morte Darthur.As a whole, the approaches and findings in this volume attest to the continued value and importance of the Arthurian legend and its scholarship as a vibrant field through which to locate and understand the many ways in which medieval literature continues to inform modern sensibilities and institutions, particularly where the matter of ethics is concerned.

This book begins by dissociating itself from two biases that have constrained much of the scholarship on the structure of Middle High German Arthurian romance: the traditional prejudice in favour of the great romances (Erec, Iwein, and Parzival) and the notion that structural analysis is merely the handmaiden of interpretation. By expanding the corpus under consideration to include all twelve romances, Professor Schultz is able to develop a structural model that attempts to do justice to the entire genre, not merely to its most famous representatives. By pursuing structural analysis for its own sake, he is able to investigate structures of many different kinds, not merely those that advance a single interpretation. The book falls into three principal parts. The first treats the semantic building blocks of Arthurian romance: the World, Society, the Other, the Hero, the Mediator, and the Recipient. Each of these represents a body of traditional meaning; in combination they generate the characteristic roles, themes, and spatial structures of romance. The second major part treats the individual episode: first its skeleton, the linear structure of the archetypical episode and its principal variants; then substance, the realization of this skeleton by the addition of actors and their attributes, perspectives, and ostensible causes; finally, surface, the consequences of the narrator's activity in generating the actual text. The third part of the book works through these same categories from the perspective of the entire romance: the varieties of skeletal structure that determines its overall shape; the ways in which the addition of substantial elements fosters coherence; the importance of the narrator in determining our understanding of an entire romance and our conception of romance as a literary genre. This book concludes with a brief code devoted to contradiction. Schultz shows that the numerous internal inconsistencies of Arthurian romance -- a feature of the genre for which it has often been taken to task -- can be explained in a number of ways: as the result of a peculiarly medieval devotion to local detail; as the consequence of intrinsic tensions in the structure of the genre; and as the reflection of certain general properties of literary texts.

In The Giant Hero in Medieval Literature Tina Boyer counters the monstrous status of giants by arguing that they are more broadly legible than traditionally believed. Building on an initial analysis of St. Augustine's City of God, Bernard of Clairvaux's deliberations on monsters and marvels, and readings in Tomasin von Zerclaere's Welsche Gast provide insights into the spectrum of antagonistic and heroic roles that giants play in the courtly realm. This approach places the figure of the giant within the cultural and religious confines of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries and allows an in-depth analysis of epics and romances through political, social, religious, and gender identities tied to the figure of the giant. Sources range from German to French, English, and Iberian works.

This volume brings together a series of key essays by Larry D Benson, well-known for his work in editing the Riverside Chaucer. Of the studies selected, the opening three deal with Old English, recasting the possibilities for the critical study of Beowulf, above all the relation between oral and written literary production. The following ten essays turn to Middle English literature, with the focus first on Chaucer, and the evolution of his works and his language, then on the social and cultural context of medieval chivalric texts. Throughout, Professor Benson approaches his subjects with a skeptical intent, even a seeming contrariness in seeking to contradict received views, but in fact with the purpose of questioning in order to understand more deeply. Scattered in their original publications, and with one hitherto unpublished, together these studies present a powerful argument for this questioning approach to fundamental issues and constitute a major contribution to the study of the literary and cultural history of the medieval world. Larry D Benson is Francis Lee Higginson Professor of English, Harvard University.

Giants are a ubiquitous feature of medieval romance. As remnants of a British prehistory prior to the civilization established, according to the Historium regum Britannie, by Brutus and his Trojan followers, giants are permanently at odds with the chivalric culture of the romance world. Whether they are portrayed as brute savages or as tyrannical pagan lords, giants serve as a limit against which the chivalric hero can measure himself. In Outsiders: The Humanity and Inhumanity of Giants in Medieval French Prose Romance, Sylvia Huot argues that the presence of giants allows for fantasies of ethnic and cultural conflict and conquest, and for the presentation—and suppression—of alternative narrative and historical trajectories that might have made Arthurian Britain a very different place. Focusing on medieval French prose romance and drawing on aspects of postcolonial theory, Huot examines the role of giants in constructions of race, class, gender, and human subjectivity. She selects for study the well-known prose Lancelot and the prose Tristan, as well as the lesser known Perceforest, Le Conte du papegau, Guiron le Courtois, and Des Grantz Geants. By asking to what extent views of giants in Arthurian romance respond to questions that concern twenty-first-century readers, Huot demonstrates the usefulness of current theoretical concepts and the issues they raise for rethinking medieval literature from a modern perspective.

Noch heute, über 800 Jahre nach ihrer Entstehung, kennt jeder die abenteuerlichen Erzählungen um König Artus und seine Ritter der Tafelrunde und die tragische Liebesgeschichte von Tristan und Isolde. Was heute fast nur noch Germanisten wissen ist hingegen, dass in der Entstehungszeit beider Erzähltraditionen im Hochmittelalter ihre Beziehung zueinander heftig diskutiert war. Tatsächlich gab es Dichter, die beide als der gleichen Welt angehörig sahen, und solche, die Tristan- und Artuswelt als zwei getrennte betrachteten. Immer aber war die Beziehung zwischen Tristanstoff, in dem die alle gesellschaftlichen Grenzen sprengende Liebe zwischen Mann und Frau im Zentrum steht, und Artusstoff, in dem die unbedingte Loyalität zwischen Rittern thematisiert wird, eine problematische. Diese Studie befasst sich mit der Frage danach, inwieweit die Dichter der mittelhochdeutschen Tristanfassungen die Welt um Artus und seinen Hofstaat in ihre Romane mit einbezogen und in welche Beziehung sie beide setzten. Untersuchungsebenen sind sowohl die Erzählwelt als auch die Struktur. Es geht um die Fragen, wie der Name Artus eingesetzt wird, ob und wie Artus und Tristan der gleichen Erzählwelt angehören, inwieweit diese Welten als historisch real angesehen wurden, aber auch darum, welche Parallelen zwischen Figuren aus beiden Traditionen bestehen und wo eine Auseinandersetzung mit der Handlungsstruktur der Artusromane erfolgt. Untersucht werden die Tristandichtungen Eilharts von Oberge, Gottfrieds von Straßburg, sowie die Gottfried-Fortsetzung von Heinrich von Freiberg. Tauchen bei Eilhart und Heinrich Artus und sein Hof als Teil der Handlung auf, grenzt gerade Gottfried sich stark von jeder Verbindung zwischen beiden Stoffen ab. Als Bezugspunkte dienen die sog.'klassischen'Artusromane Hartmanns von Aue und Wolframs von Eschenbach, sowie gelegentlich die französischen Tristanfassungen Berouls und Thomas‘ von Britannien.

Die Buchreihe Untersuchungen zur deutschen Literaturgeschichte deckt das gesamte Spektrum der germanistischen Literaturforschung ab und umfasst Monographien und Sammelbände über einzelne Epochen vom ausgehenden Mittelalter bis zur Gegenwart. Sie versammelt Beiträge zur Erklärung zentraler Begriffe der Literaturgeschichte, zu einzelnen Autoren und Werken.

This book focuses on how and why various cultures have appropriated the story of King Arthur. It is about re-vision, how cultures alter inherited texts and are, in turn, changed by them, and it deals with the ways in which various cultures have empowered the Arthurian legend so that power might be derived from it. The authors suggest that the vitality of the Arthurian legend resides in its ability to be transformed and to transform, in its potential for appropriation and use.Culture and the King deals with issues of literature, history, art, politics, economics, gender study, and popular culture. It crosses the boundaries traditionally erected around these disciplines and addresses emerging critical methodologies concerned with the “poetics of culture.”Martin B. Shichtman is Professor in the Department of English at Eastern Michigan University. James P. Carley is Associate Professor in the Department of English at York University, Ontario, Canada.