Essays examining a variety of aspects of important Arthurian poem. The present volume grew from a nucleus of four papers given at the Twelfth International Arthurian Conference at Regensburg in 1971 on the alliterative Morte Arthure, increasingly recognised as one of the great masterpiecesof medieval English literature. These lectures sought to reappraise the poem and its somewhat enigmatic historical and cultural context, and are presented here in a much revised and expanded form. Unlike most volumes of theiskind, the contributions form an integrated whole, the result of lengthy discussions among the collaborating scholars over the past year. The topics range from the poem's place among chronicles and Arthurian romances to the date, audience and attitude to contempary problems, notably that of war. pecific fields such as heraldry and laments for the dead are examined in detail, while the linguistic structure of the poem is the subject of two essays.

The papers in this book examine the thematic, structural and aesthetic relationship between medieval English literature and a wide variety of more recent modern texts. Some of the contributors re-examine the concepts of authority and representation in Chretien and Malory and of medieval romance and the modern novel, while Caxton's Morte Darthur is interpreted from the point of view of Norbert Elias; other focuses of interest are the love-death motif in nineteenth-century novels, the comic in contemporary British fiction, the literary representations of Arthurian characters (Galahad, Tristan, Gawain), and recent Beowulf translations. In addition, there are socio-historic and generic readings of Chaucer's Sir Thopas and of Troilus and Criseyde, of Ipomadon and Malory's Morte Darthur. Aspects of medieval heritage are uncovered in Horace Walpole, Furst Puckler-Muskau, Georg Kaiser, A. S. Byatt, David Lodge, Fay Weldon, Iris Murdoch, the Irish novelist Eamonn Sweeney and the Polish writer Andrzej Sapkowski, in William Gibson's cyberpunk novel Neuromancer and Peter Ackroyd's recent Clerkenwell Tales. In addition, there is a translation of Karl Heinz Goller's former essay on Chancer's Troilus and Criseyde.