Commencing with the allegorical adaptations and politicisations of Arthurian settings that arose in the wake of the 1688 Revolution, this chapter examines several discrete modes of literary Arthurianism across the long eighteenth century. As Britain formed around them, eighteenth-century English-language writers adapted the character of Arthur to new aesthetic tastes and modified the Arthurian story to suit emergent modes of story-telling, reshaping the vales of the Arthurian myth according to their own cultural and political concerns. The chapter explores the ways in which Arthur was increasingly embroiled in contested debates about English nationhood and English/British national identity whilst also tracing the evolution of the Arthurian legends into a wider Arthurian ‘mythos’ in which the overarching culture, settings, structures, symbols and themes of the Arthurian world became as significant as the individual figures and narratives featured within them.

Anglophone Arthurian films (including television) continually restage the triumphant break from the medieval that serves as the constitutive myth of origin for modernity.  The divinely appointed absolute monarch (Arthur) returns, but only to figure a sovereignty invested in the people.  Medieval Arthurian narratives explore the nature and exercise of political authority, providing ideological legitimacy for political institutions and defining the individual’s obligations within those institutions.  This chapter examines how modern Anglophone film and television remediate Arthurian legends, projecting contemporary notions of sovereignty back onto the Middle Ages.

This chapter will explore, for the first time, the existence, development and characteristics of a Latin American corpus of contemporary Arthurian literature (nineteenth to twenty-first century), written both in Spanish and Portuguese. So far, the collection and study of texts from the Latin-speaking nations of North, Central and South America (Latin America) has remained unexplored. This chapter will show that this area has suffered from unjust neglect; there is, therefore, an urgency to fill this gap in Arthurian studies. Arthur, Merlin and Isolde are found in the tropical lands of Mexico or the great plains of central Brazil, and their stories were added to local motifs; they add new meanings for different communities of readers. Latin American children and younger readers were equally fond of Arthur – as much as young readers elsewhere.

The early nineteenth-century literary revival of the Arthurian legends inaugurated a corresponding resurgence in the visual arts. New printings of historic romances and verse by contemporary poets, notably Alfred Tennyson, furnished artists with Arthurian subjects and stimulated popular demand for their work. Arthurian artworks proliferated everywhere from the Palace of Westminster to the walls of the Royal Academy to the pages of illustrated books. Under Dante Gabriel Rossetti’s leadership, the second generation of Pre-Raphaelites gave fresh forms to Arthurian narratives, imbuing them with melancholy and Romantic passion. In the latter half of the century, the trend spread from Great Britain to America and Canada, where artists introduced Arthurian figures into North American landscapes. In Europe, French, German and Belgian artists drew inspiration from Wagner’s Arthurian operas. The revival persisted into the 1920s, when post-war shifts in artistic and cultural values brought the long florescence of Arthurian art to a close.

This chapter addresses the complex theme of the penetration of the Arthurian subject in Italy through the circulation of manuscripts; the various forms that characterised this specific reception, ranging from narrative works adhering to French models to more autonomous reworkings, such as compilations (Rustichello da Pisa) and the cantari in octaves, truly anticipated the great epic poems of Boiardo and Ariosto. For a long time these texts, especially the vernacular versions, have been known among scholars by virtue of their linguistic relevance as the earliest witnesses in Italian literary prose, but it should not be forgotten that they saw the light thanks to the intensive Italian production and transcription of manuscripts in their original language. This phenomenon characterised most of the manuscript tradition of Arthurian romances in Italy (Tristan en prose, Guiron le Courtois cycle), and imposes today the use of refined and complex codicological, historical and palaeographical analyses.

This chapter takes up the complex and fluid topic of gender in relation to Arthurian romance. It explores the intersections of gender with chivalry, emotion and agency in the twelfth-century romances of Chrétien de Troyes and Marie de France and their fourteenth-century English reworkings; the gendered treatment of desire, constraint and identity in Chaucer’s Wife of Bath’s Tale; and finally the formative role of gender across Arthur’s reign in Malory’s Morte Darthur. Engagement with gender roles, emotional experience and the place and predicament of women is built into Arthurian romance from its inception, reflecting courtly interests in the nuances of behaviour and feeling. Medieval Arthurian romances repeatedly treat women as wielding profound power, including through unorthodox means of magic, but they also address the constraints of gender roles for women. Malory’s Morte Darthur illuminates the crucial part played by gender in the narrative of the rise and fall of Arthur’s kingdom, and the conflict between heterosexual and homosocial relations.

This chapter considers Arthuriana in two distinct linguistic zones: the Celtic languages (excluding Welsh) and Older Scots.  The Arthur of the ‘Gaelic world’ is a figure associated with marvellous, and sometimes comic, adventures – the overtly political themes that persist in Welsh and English writing are usually absent. In the Cornish and Breton regions, Arthur appears in politically complex hagiographical and prophetic material. Older Scots also offers complex and consistent engagement with politics, though from a different vantage point. Here, the dual themes of sovereignty and advice to princes are closely related both to one another and to the long and complex history of contemporary Anglo-Scots political and literary relations. At issue too are crucial questions of geography and national identity.

Tracing back to the uncertain origins of the Tristan legend, this chapter deals first with the earliest written forms of the story of Tristan and Isolde. It then describes the spread of the story throughout Europe, its gradual Arthurianisation, and discusses the place it may have occupied in courtly literature. The Prose Tristan concludes the rivalry between Tristan and Lancelot initiated by Chrétien de Troyes. At the same time, it completes Tristan’s integration into the canon of the Arthurian cycle. In later romances, Tristan is then regarded as equal to Lancelot on the battlefield, and the greatest of the knight-poets.

The period between 1500 and 1700 is sometimes associated with a dip in Arthur’s popularity. In fact, this was a time of Arthurian reinvention, rather than decline: if Arthur did not appear quite as frequently, his appearances nevertheless reached a new peak in terms of their creativity and variety. Increased scepticism surrounding Arthur had a freeing effect, allowing him to be invoked in new and different contexts, from satire to archery shows, and pre-existing Arthurian narratives and geographies were revised. Perhaps unexpectedly, Arthur’s diversification seems to have peaked during the years when Arthur’s narrative was the most potentially dangerous, such as England’s Interregnum and the early Restoration years. At the same time, popular medieval Arthuriana continued to be consumed in manuscript and print; and many local Arthurian traditions were first recorded and brought to wider knowledge during these years.

This chapter explores the transformation of medieval Arthurian knowledge in early modern Germany, starting with the last Meisterlieder from Hans Sachs and his followers till the middle of the sixteenth century, when medieval Arthurian literature gradually fell out of fashion. Only the Wigalois adaptations and the Prose Tristan were still printed until the late seventeenth century, and a few Arthurian topoi remained as well during this ‘Arthurian break’: the name of the sword of the king, the adultery of the queen and the opulence of the king’s court. The rediscovery of medieval literature in Germany after 1750 by Bodmer and his followers did not manage to remodel and adapt this material but instead connected the medieval tradition with classical models.

This chapter considers the Middle English Arthurian verse romances, and the ways in which these texts interact with the genre of Middle English romance at large. First, the chapter explores the relationship between expected audiences and the choice to write in verse when considering Arthurian subject matter. The chapter then turns to romances usually designated as non-Arthurian, and asks: to what extent do Arthur and his knights creep into narratives set outside, beyond or without the Arthurian court, and what might this tell us about the cultural impact of Arthurian material in medieval England? Finally, a number of romance tropes – the fair unknown, the loathly lady, and intruders of all kinds – are used to show Middle English verse romance’s potential to both reinforce and disrupt Arthurian courtly values.

Sir Thomas Malory’s late fiftenth-century prose work Le Morte Darthur is the most substantial Middle English account of the legendary king, and has strongly influenced later Arthurian writers, including Tennyson, Twain and T. H. White. We know little about  Malory and his reasons for writing (in prison); was it a commission? The Morte was printed by William Caxton, the first English printer, and frequently reprinted, but only one manuscript copy survives. I discuss Malory’s adaptation of the familiar story, using a remarkable range of sources in several languages. He gives surprising prominence to Lancelot, not a popular figure in the English tradition, and chooses to include the Grail Quest, in which most knights fail. I consider Malory’s deceptively plain style, his values, his attitudes to women, and also his historical context; he fought in the Wars of the Roses, so Arthur’s rise and fall must have had particular significance for him.

This chapter explores the cross-cultural dissemination of Arthurian literature through the lens of a single case study: the lai of Lanval, attributed to Marie de France. It begins by discussing the figure of Marie, her works, and her compositional practice, situated in the wider twelfth-century contexts of multilingual, cross-Channel literary cultures and the development of Arthurian narratives and vernacular literary forms. The study then considers the dissemination of Lanval in terms of its manuscript tradition, as well as through analogues, adaptations, translations, and other textual traces or allusions. As such, the study follows both Lanval and Lanval across medieval Europe, through the Welsh Marches, England, northern France, Flanders, Norway, Swabia and Austria.

The origins of Arthur are in the Welsh language, and this chapter presents the Welsh Arthur from those origins to the end of the Middle Ages and beyond. While Geoffrey of Monmouth reconfigured the Arthur he found, propelling him into a new trajectory, the Galfridian route does not provide the telos for the Welsh material: the most important manuscripts of the period show court poets and prose writers engaging self-consciously with traditions old and new, aware of the colonial implications of French and English Arthurs, and energetically navigating strategies of irony, satire, postcolonial reimagining and culturally confident re-engagement with the pre-Galfridian (and pre-Chrétien). Arthur is at once signifier of the ‘Britain’ of the bards (a half-imagined Welsh-speaking Britain, inheritor of Romanitas) and a field of signification on which to project contemporary political realities, over the best part of a good millennium.

Creative engagement with the Arthurian myth has been prolific in the modern period and shows no sign of abating. This chapter provides a panoramic shot, an overview of how and where the Arthurian myth surfaces in texts in English in Great Britain and Ireland from 1920 to the present. Additionally, it provides close-ups, more detailed readings of selected works that capture the critical concerns of modern artists and their audiences, foregrounding especially trauma and the impacts of war and industrialised culture; expressions of the interconnectedness between all living things, often in response to contextual ecopolitical crises; and human interactions, including tragic relationships and empowering female networks. The discussion breaks materials into broad categories that are loosely determined by form – poetry, prose and drama – and moves between foundational works and newer narratives. Where possible, the discussion foregrounds Arthuriana that has previously received little or no attention, especially works by women.

This chapter examines Welsh-language Arthurian literature from c.1500 to the twentieth century, examining both prose and poetry and considering the fusion of the ‘native’ and the ‘non-native’ and questions of cultural continuity. References from sixteenth- and seventeenth-century texts are situated in a palimpsestic view of Britain, acknowledging the political realities of the present while also invoking a vision of the unconquered heroic ancestors of the Welsh. The shift from manuscript to print culture is followed, including a look at Arthurian literature in the burgeoning Welsh periodical press. It is suggested that twentieth-century reworkings of Arthurian traditions include romantic effusions as well as experimental modern explorations, all set within the context of textual articulations of Welsh national identity.