Volume 10, Issue 1

Pelleas and Ettarde may not be particularly well-known figures today, but in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, following the publication of Alfred Lord Tennyson’s ‘Pelleas and Ettarre’ idyll, they were included or even centred in a number of Arthurian poems, plays and novels. This article explores the changing representations of Pelleas and Ettarde in post-medieval adaptations. Why do writers choose to retell and adapt this story? What kinds of intertextual connections are uncovered by focusing on these particular Arthurian afterlives? And how do modern writers reshape this story in response to contemporary perspectives on desire, consent and misogyny? Drawing upon examples from fourteen canonical and lesser-known works, this essay charts the post-medieval popularity of this story, which offers a valuable case study for understanding the changing representation of desire, consent and misogyny in modern Arthuriana.

This essay offers a close reading of David Lowery’s 2021 film The Green Knight suggesting that the director has consciously subverted the text of his source to produce an always intriguing film whose debts to the medieval are many. Unlike previous directors whose ‘Gawain’ films failed even to engage with their medieval source, Lowery follows details in his source when it suits his purpose, but, more often than not, he adds scenes to, or deletes scenes from, the fourteenth-century Middle English poem. His additions are especially noteworthy in how they offer an alternate, perhaps even a queer, reading of the poem. Lowery’s goal seems to be to retell a basically linear tale in a more convoluted and circular manner thereby calling into question viewers’ thematic and narrative expectations. At the same time, Lowery’s film can be read as an antidote to the toxic masculinity found in so many other Arthurian texts across multiple genres.

The novels of Kazuo Ishiguro span a variety of literary genres but are unified by a profound interest in the workings of memory. Guided by recent scholarship in the field of cultural memory studies, this essay analyses Ishiguro’s seventh novel, The Buried Giant , in the context of the Middle English romance traditions which it echoes both formally and thematically. In doing so, it argues that the novel’s use of Arthurian myth is a technique by which to illuminate and explore the role of literature in the formation of collective memory and cultural identity.

In ‘Notes toward a Black fantastic’, Ebony Elizabeth Thomas argues that breaking the cycle of violence to which Black girl characters are subject in both fiction and life ‘requires rethinking our assumptions about magical child and teen characters. It requires reimaging who deserves magic in stories, and rethinking the treasure maps we’ve had for the past few centuries’. Developing from this insight, and drawing on Katherine McKittrick’s analysis of Black feminist geographies, this article considers how reimaginings of the Arthurian legend for young adult audiences engage with the history of a tradition co-opted in service of white supremacist and colonialist ideologies, remapping this territory to establish spaces for the experiences of marginalised subjects. In addressing the role of Arthurian myth as the site of an ongoing negotiation of how the past matters to the present, of whose pasts and whose narratives matter, texts such as Tracy Deonn’s  Legendborn , A. R. Capetta and Cory McCarthy’s  Once & Future construct new ways of understanding space, place, and time.

This essay will examine the characterisation of the principal characters and events in ‘Le Chevalier et la Charrette’, a contemporary graphic novel adaption of the Méléagant episode based on Chrétien de Troyes’s  Le Chevalier de la charrette , by applying Mieke Bal’s classic study on narratology, in which legendary and ‘deviant’ characters evoke reactions of surprise or revulsion in the reader. The first section will address the limits of  inventio  in the portrayal of Lancelot, a legendary character whose behaviour and actions are somewhat limited by the reader’s background knowledge of him, whereas the remainder of the essay will focus on the use of the Lady of the Lake as a deviant character in the Méléagant episode. In the graphic novella, the Lady of the Lake is reinvented as a representation of Ankou, the servant of Death in Breton folklore. This allows the author and illustrator of the graphic novella to take advantage of the lacunae in the reader’s background knowledge to present a previously unknown facet of the Lady of the Lake’s character that bridges the gap between literary adaptation and literary appropriation, thereby resulting in a new cultural product that links medieval Arthurian legend to traditional Breton mythology.