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.

he route “from Romance to Mélodie” is used to imply a significant development in French “art song”, from simplicity to a sophistication equivalent to the German Lied. There is, however, no simple replacement of one by the other: the genres, in so far as they are distinct at all, actually overlap. Works titled “Romance” by Martini, Niedermeyer, Monpou, and Berlioz could be considered as mélodies avant la lettre. The word appears prominently in Berlioz’s published collection, the Mélodies irlandaises (1830). He had already shown a predisposition for variation in settings that, like Romances, are essentially strophic, and this tendency continued, for instance in “Villanelle”, the first song in Les Nuits d’été. Through-composed compositions appear among his earliest published songs, in the 1830 set, and in Les Nuits d’été which, although composed for voice and piano, has some claim to be considered the first orchestral song-cycle.

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 focus is on four important and prolific figures in the mélodie repertoire: Charles Gounod, Camille Saint-Saëns, Georges Bizet, and Jules Massenet.  The mid-nineteenth century mélodie emerged in close association with the romance and in response to the impact of the German Lied on the French scene.  Gounod was a key figure in this development, cultivating a new style through flexible shaping of melodic lines within symmetrical phrases.  Saint-Saëns followed closely in these footsteps, with more elaborate piano writing and looser phrase structure.  Bizet and Massenet did as well, injecting greater theatrical flair and a larger harmonic palette.  That Gounod, Saint-Saëns, and Massenet all began their careers perceived as progressives and ended as musical conservatives accounts in part for their eclipse by the generation of mélodie composers born after 1850, notwithstanding a repertory of over 700 mélodies that contains many pearls.

Tennyson is the dominant figure in English-language versions of the Arthur story in this period, but this chapter focuses on the tradition outside of the Idylls. By the early days of Queen Victoria’s reign the Arthurian legend was not as fixed as it would be by the end of the century. Malory’s version of the story was not as dominant as Tennyson would make it. This chapter traces the way the legend was presented by such writers as Reginald Heber, Edward Bulwer Lytton, the young William Morris, R. S. Hawker and Algernon Swinburne. The chapter also considers the way in which Arthur was evaluated as a possible historical figure, looking at Arthurian scholarship as it developed through the century in the hands of such figures as Sharon Turner through to Frederick Furnivall and Thomas Wright, to Jessie L. Weston. It concludes by looking at the entry of the legend into versions for children, with a brief nod to the future of Arthur in the cinema.

Chapter 5 explores the construction of women, especially young women, as dubious and untrustworthy figures in male discourse, a source of cynicism and doubt about kinship’s future. It captures men’s fears about ‘greedy’ women and ‘gold diggers’ who only want to marry men in order to expropriate their wealth. At the same time, the chapter explores counter-discourses of young women getting by in a world of male failure, their relations with their male kin, and their ambitions to become successful ‘hustlers’ in their own right. Speaking to regional literature on love, marriage, and youth relationships, it explores the gendered tensions created by a world of masculine destitution, illuminating male fears about the capacity of women to exploit their ‘in-betweenness’ to acquire patrilineal land.

This chapter draws on conceptualizations of the romance form by Northrop Frye and Fredric Jameson to provincialize them and delineate the imperial romance and its formal and functional specificities. It argues that the imperial romance is a colonial scripture, that is, a ritualized site for the articulation and performance of colonial ideology. It reads Philip Meadows Taylor’s “mutiny novel” Seeta (1872), set in India, and Henry Rider Haggard’s King Solomon’s Mines (1885), set in Africa, to illustrate how these texts rearticulate categories of “good” and “evil.” It also underlines how these texts articulate and resolve colonial anxieties, especially around racial miscegenation. In underlining the imperial romance as a key site for the symbolic resolution of real contradictions of colonial life, the essay illuminates its ritual (and utopian) function that reaffirms and perpetuates colonial ideology.

Chapter 2 traces the genesis of the literary tradition of vernacular love’s joy in the Occitan lyrical tradition, Chrétien de Troyes’ narrative romances and the allegorical Roman de la Rose by Guillaume de Lorris. It explores the capacity of the language of lyrical joy, which is at once nothing – an absence, a dream – and everything – the lover’s direction and life force, a capacity embodied in its recurrent patterns of spatiality, enclosure and exteriority. In Chrétien’s romances, the spaces of joie are multiplied. If joie d’amour is enclosed in the chamber and in the irretrievable feeling of two bodies and souls coming together, joie de cour embodies the communal joy of the Arthurian court to which love’s intimate joy is often opposed. In writing the phantasmatic and oneiric nature of love’s joy, both imagined and experienced, these influential twelfth- and thirteenth-century lyrical and narrative works construct a language of love’s joy which breaks down the boundaries between exterior and interior and between self and other.

At the turn of the twentieth century in Britain, genres such as the imperial romance framed by a white, masculine gaze expressed an imperial confidence that dovetailed with the jingoistic adventurism of high empire. But as interimperial rivalries intensified and anti-imperialist movements gained momentum, the romance’s generic and formal features were unsettled by a range of modernist techniques. While this is often recognized in stories by writers such as Conrad and Kipling, this chapter traces the modernist compressions and anti-imperial connections that run through the adventure fiction of two very different authors writing between 1900 and 1945: John Buchan, an arch-imperialist and politician whose romances and spy thrillers are warped by the threat of emerging interimperial rivalries; and Edward John Thompson, a friend of Gandhi and translator of Tagore whose Indian novels combine the generic residues of the romance with the growing presence of anti-imperial insurgencies. Drawing out these formal compressions with reference to modernist writers such as E. M. Forster, the chapter shows how adventure fictions unraveled through the empire’s final decades.

Chapter 5 begins by reading Willa Cather’s The Professor’s House as an experiment in cinematic projection, a phantasmagoric erasure of the means of projection. I compare Cather’s cartographic romance to that of Robert and Frances Flaherty’s Moana of the South Seas, the first film to be called “documentary.” Both the Flahertys and Cather mark US national space against the anachronism of the remote island. Spinning this view around, I tell the story of Fialelei, who served as producer and translator for the Flahertys in Sāmoa. She also accompanied them to the United States, and her voyage embodies the Samoan principle of the Vā, or “space-between.” This Oceanian counterpoint provides a new position for studying the role of cinematic fantasy in isolating the “primitive” from “civilized,” and projecting the former onto the “insular.”

This chapter argues that the resurgence of genre fiction in the contemporary period demonstrates alterations in the status of romance kinds rather than the direct impact of postmodernism. Novels make possible worlds; the actions staged in imagined worlds need not be verisimilar or plausible. Though realism has been the dominant mode of the novel, it is not the only option, especially for writers who have read widely in genre fiction since childhood. Postmodernism is not required to explain why the characteristics of romance narratives persist. Genre fiction’s thrilling plots, strong affects of suspense, curiosity, and wonder, larger-than-life characters, and reliance on supernatural explanations or conspiracy theories, have invigorated contemporary fiction. Postmodernism is best understood as a style whose adoption expresses a writer’s desire to be considered experimental, irreverent, up-to-date, and still “literary.” Emergent patterns of prize-winning novels show the erosion of the distinction between literary and genre fiction.

This chapter examines what are arguably the two most jarring moments in the relationship between the history of technology and that of the English novel by way of two novels that refigure imaginary space first for a national and then for an international readership. Charlotte Brontë’s Shirley (1849) demonstrates how the intervention of the power loom spelled the doom of the working household by moving productive labor from the home to the mechanized factory, thereby transforming domestic life into a space reserved for that highly cathected version of social reproduction: the romantic couple and nuclear family. A century and a half later, Tom McCarthy’s Remainder (2005) spells out how the spatial transformation of Victorian realism as communication technology progressively subsumed the trappings and function of both the home and communal spaces reserved for the attitudes, behaviors, and events composing everyday life and spat them out in a continuous flow of information. Where realism divides literary space into reproduction and production, love and labor, respectively, the contemporary novel collapses these categories as the former becomes a repository of information to be algorithmically guided toward a new class of consumers who desire nothing more than to become the very objects they consume.

Chapter 4 examines how the uncanny status of the automobile in Edwardian England (at once a foreign novelty, and offering a return to familiar destinations cut off by the railway) lends itself to themes of revision and romance in James’s writing. In most critical readings of James’s ‘motor-story’, ‘The Velvet Glove’, the car features primarily as a clue from which to identify the tale’s ‘real-life’ heroine, Edith Wharton. This chapter argues that the role of the automobile is much more intrinsic, with regard both to the story’s self-conscious biographical encodings and to its ironic posturing as a romance. Drawing on contemporary treatments of the motor car in music-hall songs, newspapers, and the popular chauffeur romance, as well as James’s personal correspondence and travel essays, the chapter demonstrates how the car contributes to the tale’s structured series of revelations. John Berridge’s fascination with the adventures of mobile strangers also refers to specific experiences made possible by the motor car, whose ambivalent reception inflects the story’s atmosphere of ‘supreme strangeness’.