This chapter discusses the renewed interest in the Arthurian matter in Europe in the nineteenth century with a focus on Germany, Spain, France and Italy. Tracing its reception from the Romantic period through to the emergence of modernism, we explore how the content,  values and aesthetic of Arthurian literature infused the cultural landscape. The form of reception ranges from the use of actual Arthurian material and chronotypes to the secondary influence exerted by the contemporary reception of Arthurian legend through Scott, Tennyson and later Wagner. The pattern of reception echoes that of earlier periods in its transnational character and, as the century progresses, it possible to see waves of interest with a ripple effect spreading out across Europe from Britain and the German-speaking lands as the material is incrementally absorbed into the contemporary cultural matrix of the Continent.

This chapter offers a brief overview of the field of emotion studies and surveys its contribution to the study of Arthurian literature. It then expands on the role of emotion – both as a critical category and as a narrative focus – in the development of the Arthurian canon, focusing on Sir Gawain and the Green Knight as a late exemplar of the development of the courtly romance over time. Ultimately, it considers what emotions may tell us about the narrative intent and structures of the Middle English romance and, more broadly, what the study of Arthurian emotions has to offer to the field of emotion studies.

The Arthurian legends have been taken up by educators, poets, playwrights and novelists in the British colonies in Australia and the societies that emerged from them, developing an Arthurianism that has contributed to the formation of Australian identity and national consciousness. This chapter examines the changing significance of these legends as an imaginative prism through which Australian experience has been refracted. While in some instances Arthurianism distances the colonial subject from their antipodean surrounds, elsewhere it creates a vision of Camelot transformed by life in Australian environments. Arthurian legend has been valuable for exploring the states of colonial dependence and cultural autonomy, and has provided an indispensable resource for understanding modern femininity in the Australian context. Australian Arthurianism’s capacity for constant renewal is reflective of a culture undergoing significant changes in its self-understanding; indeed, renewal is at the heart of Arthurianism itself, even at a profound distance from its source.

Tennyson’s Idylls, so popular a subject of illustration in the Victorian era, have not been the subject of much illustration in the last hundred years – though a number of illustrated editions of ‘The Lady of Shalott’ have appeared in that period. Nevertheless, illustrations of the Idylls influenced a spate of illustrated editions, retellings or adaptations of Malory’s Morte, the book that inspired most of the Arthurian illustrations in the last century, and of other major works, especially of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight.

Arthurian romance is quintessentially a literature of mobility; not only a literature of the transportive and ephemeral nature of love, but also an apex of unnamed long-distance economic networks. These networks provided an understructure for the Arthurian corpus, one that reinforced an appetite for global luxury goods and that fuelled an economy of pleasure. While narrating the physical mobility of knights and the emotional mobility of the desire for, attainment and loss of love, Arthurian romance also celebrated and accelerated the exchange of prestige goods through the networks of the Global Middle Ages. The acquisition and ephemerality of material objects and literary motifs from diverse cultures links the local and imaginative spaces of Arthurian narratives with global commerce.

While Arthur functioned as a point of reference and a hero to be emulated in early medieval Welsh texts, the rise in interest in utilising King Arthur and the values he stood for in visibly political ways becomes evident in the period following the twelfth century. Appropriations of the symbolism from Arthurian stories ranged from objects, performances, ceremonies, events (such as Arthurian-themed tournaments and pageants) and displays. This chapter interrogates the social and political uses of these varied instances of Arthurianism, linking them, where possible, to their Arthurian literary sources. It aims to show, selectively, the breadth of inspiration drawn from Arthurian legends across Europe for daily life, particularly among those who had urgent and real benefits to reap from association with the legendary king.

This chapter studies the significance of King Arthur’s status as a military fighter and as a leader of warriors in both medieval and modern literary contexts. First exploring the militarist and imperialist version of King Arthur that was appropriated and expanded by Geoffrey of Monmouth, the essay shows how aggressive Arthurian militarism was consistently haunted by anti-imperialist critique, particularly within late medieval romances of the Old French tradition (such as Chrétien de Troyes’s Perceval) and late medieval English work (particularly, Sir Gawain and the Green Knight). After analysing the ambivalence of Arthurian militarism within Malory, the essay shows the modern deployment of Arthurian militarism by figures such as Spenser and Tennyson. The essay closes with comparison of ghostly, late medieval warnings about the ill fruits of militarism in the Awntyrs off Arthure with Kazuo Ishiguro’s contemporary portrait of the endemic nature of violence in the Britain shaped by Arthurian militarist culture.

This chapter offers a brief overview of patterns in approach, tone, theme and characterisation in North American engagements with the Arthurian legend since 1900. It considers retellings of the medieval romance and historiographic traditions alongside adaptations in multiple modes and media that are not especially interested in the earliest iterations of Arthur’s story. Paying particular attention to the perspectives from which these texts are told, the chapter considers how the diverse nature of these reimaginings challenges audiences to consider what exactly makes a text Arthurian while also acknowledging that the legend’s flexibility is central to its enduring popularity.

The seventeen French Arthurian romances in octosyllabic rhymed couplets considered in this chapter were written between the end of the twelfth century, or beginning of the thirteenth century, to the end of the fourteenth century, and with few exceptions are limited to northeastern France, Flanders and England. This chapter does not propose to study each of the seventeen romances, but to offer an overview, with the aim of situating them in a broad literary and cultural landscape. Textual culture will be the focus, seen as the meeting point between the text (romance) and manuscript, and between text typologies and typologies of text transmission.

This chapter discusses the long Arthurian section of Geoffrey of Monmouth’s twelfth-century Latin history of Britain, the De gestis Britonum (or Historia regum Britanniae). It sets Arthur in the context of Geoffrey’s focus on the strengths and weaknesses of a long line of British kings, starting with Brutus, the Trojan refugee who follows the goddess Diana’s prophecy to settle the island of Britain. The Britons are shown to be imperial and formidable, but also subject to internecine strife. British kings sometimes make disastrous decisions because of their own desires. Arthur is a paragon, a perfect king, and the narrative’s lingering over his reign and his victory over the Romans can make readers forget the larger pattern that governs Geoffrey’s history. But at the height of success, he is betrayed by his nephew, and while he wins his final battle, he is fatally wounded: all kings must, in the end, die.

Arthur emerges into history in the Historia Brittonum, written in North Wales in the ninth century. That is, though, a problematic work as regards establishing the ‘original’ text, its author’s purpose and its claim to historicity. Arthur’s inclusion as a ‘British’ hero who defeated the Saxons twelve times is compared to other war-leaders this author included, with attention drawn additionally to the geographical spread of these conflicts, likely borrowings from earlier works and the (probable) ‘Roman’ origin of the name. Overall, it is suggested that Arthur’s portrayal herein was, at best, heavily fictionalised. He emerges as a primarily literary figure, rather than historical, who was developed as a means of asserting the Britons had shown courage and military prowess, and received divine support, in their long struggle with the Anglo-Saxons, pushing back against their negative stereotyping in influential works by both Gildas and Bede, which were both still circulating.