Best Arthurian Romance Criticism Books
Here you will get Best Arthurian Romance Criticism Books For you.This is an up-to-date list of recommended books.
1. Sir Gawain and the Green Knight
Author: by Simon Armitage
English
208 pages
0393334155
The classic story that inspired the film starring Dev Patel and Alicia VikanderA medieval romancebut also an outlandish ghost story, a gripping morality tale and a weird thriller. I couldn’t put down Simon Armitage’s compulsively readable… Energetic, free-flowing, high-spirited version.
Edward Hirsch, New York Times Book ReviewOne of the founding stories of English literature, Sir Gawain and the Green Knight narrates the strange tale of a green knight on a green horse who rudely interrupts Camelot’s Round Table festivities one Yuletide, casting a pall of unease over the company and challenging one of their number to a wager.
The virtuous Gawain accepts and decapitates the intruder with his own axe. Gushing blood, the knight reclaims his head, orders Gawain to seek him out a year hence, and departs. The following Yuletide, Gawain dutifully sets forth. His quest for the Green Knight involves a winter journey, a seduction scene in a dreamlike castle, a dire challenge answeredand a drama of enigmatic reward disguised as psychic undoing.
2. Wuthering Heights
Author: by Emily Bronte
English
230 pages
150531349X
He’s more myself than I am. Whatever our souls are made of, his and mine are the same. Emily Bront, Wuthering HeightsWuthering Heights is Emily Bront’s first and only published novel, written between October 1845 and June 1846, and published in 1847 under the pseudonym Ellis Bell; Bront died the following year, aged 30.
The decision to publish came after the success of her sister Charlotte’s novel, Jane Eyre. After Emily’s death, Charlotte edited the manuscript of Wuthering Heights, and arranged for the edited version to be published as a posthumous second edition in 1850.
Wuthering Heights is the name of the farmhouse where the story unfolds. The book’s core theme is the destructive effect of jealousy and vengefulness both on the jealous or vengeful individuals and on their communities. A True Classic that Belongs on Every Bookshelf!
3. Sir Gawain and the Green Knight (Norton Critical Editions)
Author: by Marie Borroff
English
272 pages
0393930254
This long-awaited Norton Critical Edition of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight includes Marie Borroff’s celebrated, newly revised verse translation with supporting materials not to be found in any other single volume. The text is accompanied by a detailed introduction, an essay on the metrical form, the translator’s note, marginal glosses, and explanatory annotations to assist readers in the study of this canonical Arthurian romance.
Contexts presents two French tales of Sir Gawain and a passage from the Alliterative Morte Arthure, also translated by Marie Borroff, as well as three selections from the original Middle English poem. Criticism collects ten interpretive essays on the poem’s central themes.
Contributors include Alain Renoir, Marie Borroff, J.A.Burrow, A.Kent Hieatt, W.A. Davenport, Ralph Hanna III, Lynn Staley Johnson, Jonathan Nicholls, Geraldine Heng, and Leo Carruthers. A Chronology of important historical and literary dates and a Selected Bibliography are also included.
4. Romance of the Grail: The Magic and Mystery of Arthurian Myth (The Collected Works of Joseph Campbell)
Author: by Joseph Campbell
New World Library
English
304 pages
The first collection of Joseph Campbell’s writings and lectures on the Arthurian romances of the Middle Ages, a central focus of his celebrated scholarship, edited and introduced by Arthurian scholar Evans Lansing Smith, PhD, the chair of Mythological Studies at Pacifica Graduate Institute.
Throughout his life, Joseph Campbell was deeply engaged in the study of the Grail Quests and Arthurian legends of the European Middle Ages. In this new volume of the Collected Works of Joseph Campbell, editor Evans Lansing Smith collects Campbell’s writings and lectures on Arthurian legends, including his never-before-published master’s thesis on Arthurian myth, A Study of the Dolorous Stroke.
Campbell’s writing captures the incredible stories of such figures as Merlin, Gawain, and Guinevere as well as the larger patterns and meanings revealed in these myths. Merlin’s death and Arthur receiving Excalibur from the Lady of the Lake, for example, are not just vibrant stories but also central to the mythologist’s thinking.
5. Romeo and Juliet: The Tragical History Deluxe Club Edition (Shakespeare's Original)
Author: by William Shakespeare
English
92 pages
1505259568
Romeo and Juliet is a tragedy written by William Shakespeare early in his career about two young star-crossed lovers whose deaths ultimately reconcile their feuding families. It was among Shakespeare’s most popular plays during his lifetime and, along with Hamlet, is one of his most frequently performed plays.
Today, the title characters are regarded as archetypal young lovers. Romeo and Juliet belongs to a tradition of tragic romances stretching back to antiquity. Its plot is based on an Italian tale, translated into verse as The Tragical History of Romeus and Juliet by Arthur Brooke in 1562 and retold in prose in Palace of Pleasure by William Painter in 1567.
Shakespeare borrowed heavily from both but, to expand the plot, developed supporting characters, particularly Mercutio and Paris. Believed to have been written between 1591 and 1595, the play was first published in a quarto version in 1597. This text was of poor quality, and later editions corrected it, bringing it more in line with Shakespeare’s original.
6. The Romance of Arthur: An Anthology of Medieval Texts in Translation
Author: by Norris J. Lacy
Routledge
English
584 pages
The Romance of Arthur, James J. Wilhelm’s classic anthology of Arthurian literature, is an essential text for students of the medieval Romance tradition. This fully updated third edition presents a comprehensive reader, mapping the course of Arthurian literature, and is expanded to cover: key authors such as Chrtien de Troyes and Thomas of Britain, as well as Arthurian texts by women and more obscure sources for Arthurian romance extensive coverage of key themes and characters in the tradition a wide geographical range of texts including translations from Latin, French, German, Spanish, Welsh, Middle English, and Italian sources a broad chronological range of texts, encompassing nearly a thousand years of Arthurian romance.Norris J.
Lacy builds on the book’s source material, presenting readers with a clear introduction to many accessible modern-spelling versions of Arthurian texts. The extracts are presented in a new reader-friendly format with detailed suggestions for further reading and illustrations of key places, figures, and scenes.
7. Le Morte Darthur (Norton Critical Editions)
Author: by Sir Thomas Malory
English
1008 pages
0393974642
The text is unabridged, with original spelling and extensive, easy-to-use marginal glosses and footnotes. No other edition accurately represents the actual (and likely authorial) divisions of the text as attested to by its two surviving witnessesCaxton’s 1485 print and, especially, the famous Winchester Manuscript.
The Winchester Manuscript is now generally agreed to be the more authentic of the two earlier texts. The Norton Critical Edition is the first edition of Malory to recover important elements of this manuscript: paragraphing marginal annotations hierarchies of narrative division as signaled by size and decorative intricacy of initial capitals and font changes The Norton Critical Edition also represents, in black-letter font, the striking rubrication of proper names in the Winchester Manuscript, reconstructing for readers something of an authentic medieval reading experience, one which gives visual support to Malory’s extraordinary representation, in character and setting, of a chivalric ideal.
8. The Inklings and King Arthur: J. R. R. Tolkien, Charles Williams, C. S. Lewis, and Owen Barfield on the Matter of Britain
Author: by Sørina Higgins
English
566 pages
1944769897
Will King Arthur ever return to England?He already has. In the midst of war-torn Britain, King Arthur returned in the writings of the Oxford Inklings.Learn how J.R.R.Tolkien, C.S. Lewis, Charles Williams, and Owen Barfield brought hope to their times and our own in their Arthurian literature.
Although studies of the Oxford Inklings abound, astonishingly enough, none has yet examined their great body of Arthurian work. Yet each of these major writers tackled serious and relevant questions about government, gender, violence, imperialism, secularism, and spirituality through their stories of the Quest for the Holy Grail.
This rigorous and sophisticated volume studies does so for the first time. This serious and substantial volume addresses a complex subject that scholars have for too long overlooked. The contributors show how, in the legends of King Arthur, the Inklings found material not only for escape and consolation, but also, and more importantly, for exploring moral and spiritual questions of pressing contemporary concern.
9. Sir Gawain and the Green Knight (Dover Books on Literature & Drama)
Author: by Jessie L. Weston
Dover Publications
English
64 pages
This prose rendering of a poem from the late fourteenth century (or earlier) recounts an adventure undertaken by King Arthur’s famous nephew, Sir Gawain. Brave and chivalrous, faithful to his word and ever-mindful of his honor, as well as others’, Gawain represents the model of knightly grace.
When a gigantic stranger clad in green armor bursts in on the Round Table assembly to issue a challenge, the gallant Gawain volunteers to do battle for his king. This parable blends paganistic elements and Christian ethics to celebrate the virtue of forgiveness, and it is frequently assigned to classes in literature and history because of its short length and its excellent representation of chivalric tradition.
10. The Gawain Poet: Complete Works: Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, Patience, Cleanness, Pearl, Saint Erkenwald
Author: by Marie Borroff
English
306 pages
0393912353
Of the five poems contained in this book, two are acknowledged masterpieces. The plot of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, an Arthurian romance, brilliantly interweaves elements of suspense and high comedy. Pearl, a dream vision, presents its poignant story of the education of a misguided Christian soul in metrically intricate and verbally ornate stanzas that add up to an overarching numerical design.
Together with these two, Patience, Cleanness, and Saint Erkenwald make up the complete works of their anonymous author. All exhibit the dramatizing powers and metrical virtuosity of a master-poet. But none became part of the established literary canon until the second half of the nineteenth century, when the single manuscript copies in which they survive were edited and printed.
Taken together, these works offer us a wide-ranging portrait of life in the late Middle Ages from the point of view of an independent-minded, learned, and cosmopolitan Englishman, a man as conversant with the conduct of life in great households as with Christian tradition and doctrine.
11. Sir Gawain and the Green Knight
Author: by W. S. Merwin
Knopf
English
208 pages
A splendid new translation of the classic Arthurian tale of enchantment, adventure, and romance, presented alongside the original Middle English text. It is the height of Christmas and New Year’s revelry when an enormous knight with brilliant green clothes and skin descends upon King Arthur’s court.
He presents a sinister challenge: he will endure a blow of the axe to his neck without offering any resistance, but whoever gives the blow must promise to take the same in exactly a year and a day’s time. The young Sir Gawain quickly rises to the challenge, and the poem tells of the adventures he findsan almost irresistible seduction, shockingly brutal hunts, and terrifyingly powerful villainsas he endeavors to fulfill his promise.
Capturing the pace, impact, and richly alliterative language of the original text, W.S. Merwin has imparted a new immediacy to a spellbinding narrative, written centuries ago by a poet whose name is now unknown, lost to time. Of the Green Knight, Merwin notes in his foreword: We seem to recognize himhis splendor, the awe that surrounds him, his menace and his gracewithout being able to place him …
12. The Oxford Guide to Arthurian Literature and Legend (Oxford Quick Reference)
Author: by Alan Lupack
Oxford University Press
English
512 pages
The Oxford Guide to Arthurian Literature and Legend is both a critical history of the Arthurian tradition and a reference guide to Arthurian works, names, characters, symbols, and places. Seven essays offer a comprehensive survey of the legends in all of their manifestations, from theirorigins in medieval literature to their adaptation in modern literature, arts, film, and popular culture.
It also demonstrates the tremendous continuity of the legends by examining the ways that they have been reinterpreted over the years. The indispensable reference on the subject, it also containsencyclopedic entries, bibliographies, and a comprehensive index. The extensive chapter-by-chapter bibliographies, which are subdivided by topic, augment the general bibliography of Arthurian resources.
Comprehensive in its analysis and hypertextual in its approach, the Oxford Guide to Arthurian Literature and Legend is an essential reference book for Arthurian scholars, medievalists, and for those interested in cultural studies of myth and legend.
13. The Arthur of the Italians: The Arthurian Legend in Medieval Italian Literature and Culture (Arthurian Literature in the Middle Ages)
Author: by Gloria Allaire
University of Wales Press
English
299 pages
The Arthurian legend reached all levels of society in medieval and Renaissance Italy, from princely courts, with their luxury books and frescoed palaces, to the merchant classes and popular audiences in the piazza, who enjoyed shorter retellings in verse and prose.
The Arthur of the Italians offers an overview of the Arthurian fiction and art created in Italy during this time, with chapters examining, among other topics, the transmission of the French romances across Italy; the reworking of Arthurian tales in various Italian regional dialects; the textual relations of the story of Tristan; the narrative structures employed by Italian writers; later ottava rima poetic versions in the new medium of printed books; and the Arthurian-themed art of the Middle Ages and Renaissance.
