Arthurian Literature By Women

First Published in 1999. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.

Featuring three original and 14 classic essays, this volume examines literary representations of women in Arthuriana and how women artists have viewed them. The essays discuss the female characters in Arthurian legend, medieval and modern readers of the legend, modern critics and the modern women writers who have recast the Arthurian inheritance, and finally women visual artists who have used the material of the Arthurian story. All the essays concentrate interpretation on a female creator and the work. This collection contains a useful bibliography of material devoted to female characters in Arthurian literature.

This is the first full-length study of the role of women in Arthurian literature. It covers writing from the medieval period, the Renaissance, the Victorian age and in contemporary fiction. Covering the key Arthurian texts, such as Chaucer's Wife of Bath's Tale, Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, Malory's Morte D'arthur, Spenser's The Faerie Queene and Tennyson's Idylls, it also investigates the less well-known works by women: Lady Charlotte Guest's Mabinogion, Julia Margaret Cameron's illustration to Tennyson's works and, finally, the Arthurian women writers of the twentieth century.

A collection of critical essays on female characters in Arthurian literature and biographical essays on women Arthurian scholars. Edited by Bonnie Wheeler and Fiona Tolhurst, literary inheritors of the feminist Arthurian legacy, these essays pay tribute to Maureen Fries, who played a ground-breaking role in re-examining traditional perceptions of the stories of King Arthur and his court as well as preconceptions about women scholars.

Seminar paper from the year 2006 in the subject English Language and Literature Studies - Literature, grade: 2,0, Ernst Moritz Arndt University of Greifswald (Anglistik/Amerikanistik), course: "Historical Linguistics and Medieval English Studies" Proseminar "King Arthur in Medieval England", 17 entries in the bibliography, language: English, abstract: In King Arthur's court represented in Arthurian literature, women play a centrally important role. Not only do they often influence the heroes of such stories in many ways, they even exert a strong influence on the events in the story and thus on the storyline itself. In the following seminar paper I will elaborate on the roles of women in Arthurian literature. On that account I will concentrate on the medieval romance The Knight with the Lion (Yvain) by the French romance writer Chrétien de Troyes as well as on the poem Sir Gawain and the Green Knight. In these two pieces of Arthurian literature, the reader encounters different types of women. In the following, I will take a closer look at these women.

Though firmly rooted in the Middle Ages, Arthurian legend has captivated readers since Caxton and Malory and continues to thrive today. By looking at contemporary reworkings of Arthuriana, this book explores the intersection of popular fiction and feminist discourses in Western society. It examines selected Arthurian novels and short stories by such women writers as Fay Sampson, Mary Stewart, Gillian Bradshaw, and Marion Zimmer Bradley to analyze the textual strategies that articulate feminist ideas. While these texts maintain continuity with established literary traditions through the replication of conventions, their reworking of women's roles encourages readers to engage liberal feminist ideology. The book first gives an overview of theories of popular fiction, feminism, and reading. It then surveys the medieval texts on which the Arthurian tradition is founded and which the contemporary texts rewrite. The chapters that follow discuss how popular contemporary women writers have reworked Arthurian legend through their narrative strategies and their representation of female character types, such as the royal woman and the magical woman.

Twenty-nine collected essays represent a critical history of Shakespeare's play as text and as theater, beginning with Samuel Johnson in 1765, and ending with a review of the Royal Shakespeare Company production in 1991. The criticism centers on three aspects of the play: the love/friendship debate.

This book reveals the breadth and depth of women’s engagements with Arthurian romance in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Tracing the variety of women’s responses to the medieval revival through Gothic literature, travel writing, scholarship, and decorative gift books, it argues that differences in the kinds of Arthurian materials read by and prepared for women produced a distinct female tradition in Arthurian writing. Examining the Arthurian interests of the best-selling female poets of the day, Felicia Hemans and Letitia Elizabeth Landon, and uncovering those of many of their contemporaries, the Arthurian myth in the Romantic period is a vibrant location for debates about the function of romance, the role of the imagination, and women’s place in literary history.