Malory and His European Contemporaries: Adapting Late Arthurian Romance (Electronic book text)

The late-medieval adaptions and compiliations of the Arthurian story are a European phenomenon that has sparked both mystification and controversy. Often dismissed as nostalgic recreations that attempt to halt the literary tide, these ambitious projects saw adaptors from across Western Europe combining a vast array of prose and verse sources from different languages into encyclopedic narrative chronologies of King Arthur and his court. Ranging from ornate verse adaptations to heavily condensed prose works, the resulting texts reflect a process of translating, cutting and arranging Arthurian material into new literary incarnations, which nonetheless retain recognisable versions of the Arthurian story. This study re-evaulates Malory's 'Morte Darthur' and other contemporary collections, showing the complex ways in which they reshape their material.