The area covered by Romance languages, literatures and cultures between 1550 and 1800 is characterised by a decline in the Arthurian tradition and by exchanges which led to the dissolution of the Arthurian romance into the chivalric narrative. The vogue for Carolingian matter may well have led, episodically, to the preservation of Arthurian memories, but overall, it accelerated the decline of the Round Table romances, particularly in Italy. The Iberian and Italian areas promoted heroes such as Amadis and Roland, who were destined for European success, whilst France recovers the Beau Tenebreux, thanks to Herberay des Essarts. During that period, the erosion of the Matter of Britain was more marked in the Roman area than in Britain, where Arthur remained something of a national symbol. Including these derivative heroes (Amadis, Roland/Orlando) allows us to bring to light the specificities of the areas under consideration.

This chapter traces the growth of Tennyson’s Idylls of the King from his earliest ideas for an Arthurian epic in his notebooks from the 1830s to the completion of his twelve-book epic in 1886. It examines his treatment of his Arthurian sources, most importantly Malory, and attempts to capture the reactions of nineteenth-century readers to the Idylls by drawing on a range of contemporary reviews. It is difficult to overestimate Tennyson’s role in recentring the Arthurian legend in popular consciousness, and the final section briefly explores the influence of the Idylls on aspects of Victorian popular culture.

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.

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.

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 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.

This chapter selectively draws on medieval and post-medieval Arthurian material to consider how, across time, children figure as the subjects of, and the audience for, Arthurian literature. Viewed in the context of medieval education, French romances use accounts of childhood and of enfances (knights’ youthful exploits) to explore ethical and narrative concerns, while some of their central tropes resurface in the Morte Darthur, which is relatively more diffident about childhood and youth per se, to illuminate important aspects of Malory’s art. The chapter outlines some of the culturally influential Anglophone Morte-inspired Arthuriads written for children from the nineteenth century onwards and Arthurian treatments in other child-focused texts, including fantasy writing, novels set in the fifteenth century and in Roman Britain, and Grail-inspired young adult fiction. Arthurian children’s literature, constituted by extraordinary conversations between writers across time and genre, cumulatively exemplifies the nature and creative power of Arthurian intertextuality.

This chapter discusses a multiplicity of Arthurs, all mirroring the complexity of contemporary Africa and the Middle East. Arthur is a familiar presence here in advertisements, video games, children’s books and popular films, but he is rarely found elsewhere. Interestingly, both Chaka and Saladin are sometimes positioned as local counters to Arthur, but later Arthurian references are more likely to be comic or satirical, except for allusions to the Grail legend. References to the latter are characteristic of Nashid Uruk, for instance, and it has been argued that Doris Lessing’s work also reveals a sustained pattern of Grail imagery. Other representations of Arthur are almost entirely negative, linking him to autocratic rule, class elitism, gender imbalance and armed violence; however, awareness of Sir Moriaen, the Moorish knight, seems to be resurging and this may at last allow the tales to move out of the oppressive shadow cast by European imperialism.

This chapter considers William Morris’s first collection of poetry, The Defence of Guenevere and other Poems (1858). It starts by observing that the features of the collection given a difficult early reception by critics also ensured its popularity in the twentieth century. The chapter goes on to discuss Robert Browning’s influence on Morris and sets his manner of experimentation in the context of Pre-Raphaelite and medievalist aesthetics. Close attention is given to key poems from the collection, including ‘The Defence oThis chapter considers William Morris’s first collection of poetry, The Defence of Guenevere and other Poems (1858). It starts by observing that the features of the collection given a difficult early reception by critics also ensured its popularity in the twentieth century. The chapter goes on to discuss Robert Browning’s influence on Morris and sets his manner of experimentation in the context of Pre-Raphaelite and medievalist aesthetics. Close attention is given to key poems from the collection, including ‘The Defence of Guenevere’ and ‘The Haystack in the Floods’. f Guenevere’ and ‘The Haystack in the Floods’.

This chapter tracks Morris’s biographical involvements with Oxford across his lifetime, and examines the role of Oxford, as both city and university, in prompting the radical political commitments of his later years. On his arrival there as an undergraduate in 1853, he was deeply disillusioned with the official teaching of the university, but made a number of formative friendships which opened to him new cultural and social horizons. The intellectual influence of John Ruskin interacted with Morris’s own intense response to Oxford’s ancient architecture to propel him further in the direction of social critique. In later years, as activist for the Society for the Protection of Ancient Buildings, Morris threw himself into campaigns to protect key Oxford sites. As a socialist activist from 1883, he regarded Oxford as an important city to capture for the cause, lecturing there on socialism no less than six times (ably assisted by his old friend Charles Faulkner, who founded the Oxford branch of the Socialist League). We can also trace links between the Bodleian Library’s holdings and Morris’s own publishing venture, the Kelmscott Press; and Oxford plays a significant role in both the local imagery and overall geography of his utopia News from Nowhere.

This chapter focuses on the reception of Old Norse-Icelandic literature. It begins with a discussion of the definition of the term ‘reception’ and moves on to describe the beginnings of medievalism in Europe and its roots in social and political change. The relationship between nationalism and a ‘Nordic’ or ‘Germanic’ racial identity is explored, and the role of Old Norse myth in politics, ideology and propaganda is analysed. Following a survey of early modern and eighteenth-century European responses to Old Norse literature, including the work of Paul-Henri Mallet, and nineteenth-century translations of Old Norse literature and the work of Jacob Grimm, the discussion moves on to German nationalism and Old Norse, culminating in the National Socialist appropriation of Old Norse mythology and motifs. The use of medieval Icelandic literature to reconstruct a supposed pre-Christian Germanic religion is outlined, and the anti-Christian and anti-Jewish attitudes of so-called völkisch thought explained. The subsequent rise of Neopaganism throughout the world is the subject of the rest of the chapter, with special attention to the racist ideology evident in various Neopagan groups.

This chapter illustrates the cycle of adaptation, consumption, and production by which the medieval romance genre has sustained itself over time to remain vital in multiple national traditions: French adaptations of Tristan and Isolde and Arthurian romances, Germany’s continuing engagement with the Siegfried legend, Italian novels, such as those written by Umberto Eco and Italo Calvino, Spanish adaptations of Don Quixote and El Cid, and the long Anglo-American love affair with the medieval past. After an examination of the unique intersection of genre, story world, and media that makes medieval romance so infinitely adaptable, the chapter focuses on a series of post–World War II Anglo-American adaptations of the Arthurian legend. These texts, beginning withThe Adventures of Sir Galahad (1949) and concluding with The Green Knight (2021), each produced at a moment when either cultural context or technological innovation provided the impetus for a new Arthurian adaptation, mobilized the romance genre’s adaptive potential and deployed new media and technologies to attract the attention of audiences and critics. As they did so, they brought the narrative back into the cultural conversation, inspired other producers to seek to capitalize on King Arthur’s popularity, and ensured the continuing vitality of medieval romance.

Across his oeuvre, Ishiguro has imaginatively reworked a host of literary and artistic genres, from the debts to the gothic tradition in A Pale View of Hills to the science fiction thematics of Never Let Me Go and Klara and the Sun. At the same time, he has expressed ambivalence and even hostility towards the genres his novels draw on, prompting polemical responses from such influential writers of genre fiction as Ursula K. Le Guin, Neil Gaiman, and Margaret Atwood. This chapter sheds light on Ishiguro’s distinctively equivocal relation to genre fiction by examining how his four most recent novels self-consciously engage with and exploit the genres of detective, dystopian, fantasy, and science fiction.

This essay introduces the medievalism of African American sociologist and activist W.E.B. Du Bois. Du Bois’s medievalism, a device to promote the ends of racial justices, also becomes a critical and epistemic tool, a lens through which to view and analyze the present by using the European Middle Ages for comparison and as a metaphor. Examining fictional, sociological, and historical writings, the essay traces Du Bois’s deployments of the Middle Ages from the first decade of the twentieth century to just after the second World War. It considers Du Bois’s early short story “The Princess Steel”; Du Bois’s interwar medievalism through his 1928 novel Dark Princess; and finally his 1947 speech “Color and Democracy” after his book of the same name. The essay establishes that Du Bois employed a sophisticated medievalism strategically in order to assert African Americans’ equal access to and ownership of US and European history and culture.

American poetry of the First World War is best known through a very small number of poems by the modernists Ezra Pound and E. E. Cummings. But the war provided the occasion for a huge amount of poetry. This poetry was written in a variety of forms and expressed a wide range of opinions about the war. Open and closed forms, dialect and formal verse provided media through which the war was imagined for and explained to the reading public. Just as the range of forms is wide, so too is the range of poets: early modernists (Carl Sandburg, Vachel Lindsay) and established popular writers (Everard Jack Appleton, Mary Raymond Shipman Andrews) as well as obscure amateurs (Lindley Grant Long, Walter E. Seward). And while American poetry did not produce a Wilfred Owen or Siegfried Sassoon, it did produce a number of solder-poets such as Alan Seeger, Byron H. Comstock, and John Allan Wyeth whose work ranges as widely in kind and outlook as does the broader corpus.

This chapter discusses the continuities and contrasts between ‘Romantic Gothic’ and ‘Victorian medievalism’, focusing on the figures of Robert Southey and William Morris. Bringing together the perspectives developed in Morris’s conservationist activities with the Society for the Protection of Ancient Buildings and his utopian romance, and Southey’s ‘black letter’ works of 1817, it argues for the early and late nineteenth-century presence of an alternative ‘history of the Gothic’. This is Gothic as what Morris called a ‘style historic’, articulated either side of the 1840s and the rise of historicism in architecture and ‘medievalism’ in literature. Where Morris ultimately chose a harder-edged Nordic ‘Gothic’ over the ‘maundering medievalism’ of Tennyson and Rossetti, Southey consistently avoided the category, despite being present at its inception with his review of the 1817 work in which the word ‘medieval’ first appeared. Revising received critical and semantic histories of ‘Gothic’ being subsumed by the medieval, the chapter explores the articulation and the ongoing significance of a more granular, aphasic and rhizomatic approach to the art and culture of the Middle Ages.

This chapter examines the numerous meanings of ‘Gothic’ in the period before 1800 to explain how it was understood in a variety of contexts, from politics and Protestantism to architectural heritage and literary style. The ancient Goths were simultaneously seen as the barbarian destroyers of Classical civilisation, and as the northern champions of liberty against Roman tyranny and corruption. The reputed organisation of ancient Gothic society was understood to have provided the foundations for post-Roman English and later British systems of government, so influencing both the constitution and contemporary politics, especially among Whigs. The perceived links between the Goths of antiquity and the history and society of the Middle Ages and the Reformation in turn provided the basis of a national cultural identity that was increasingly celebrated and revived in the eighteenth century, and the term was adopted in broader debates on governance, cultural values, national character and the environment. The literary dimensions of Gothicism, inspired by medieval romances, added further characteristics of the supernatural and the mysterious to the term's changing meanings.