Published in 1999, the ten essays in this collection identify and examine reworkings of identifiable source texts from the medieval or Renaissance periods. The reasons for the modern adaptations depend variously on an individual author’s personal perspectives, the worldview of his or her society, and the individual’s place in it. The various chapters therefore address issues such as why a particular model was chosen and how its retelling depends on the modern author/auteur’s misreading or rereading of medieval chivalric conventions. This book compliments numerous existing studies of medievalism in the Enlightenment and Victorian eras by examining more recent adaptations of the much studied Arthurian romances, but primarily extends the discussion on the nature of revivals to other medieval or Renaissance chivalric texts, especially the Carolingian cycle epic. The collection includes not only literary retellings of medieval texts, but also some in different media, such as theatre and cinema.

The polysemous German word Geschlecht -- denoting gender, genre, kind, kinship, species, race, and somehow also more -- exemplifies the most pertinent questions of the translational, transdisciplinary, transhistorical, and transnational structures of the contemporary humanities: What happens when texts, objects, practices, and concepts are transferred or displaced from one language, tradition, temporality, or form to another? What is readily transposed, what resists relocation, and what precipitate emerges as distorted or new? Drawing on Barbara Cassin's transformative remarks on untranslatability, and the activity of “philosophizing in languages,” scholars contributing to The Geschlecht Complex examine these and other durable queries concerning the ontological powers of naming, and do so in the light of recent artistic practices, theoretical innovations, and philosophical incitements. Combining detailed case studies of concrete “category problems” in literature, philosophy, media, cinema, politics, painting, theatre, and the performing arts with a range of indispensable excerpts from canonical texts -- by notable, field-defining thinkers such as Apter, Cassin, Cavell, Derrida, Irigaray, Malabou, and Nancy, among others -- the volume presents “the Geschlecht complex” as a condition to become aware of, and in turn, to companionably underwrite any interpretive endeavor. Historically grounded, yet attuned to the particularities of the present, the Geschlecht complex becomes an invaluable mode for thinking and theorizing while ensconced in the urgent immediacy of pressing concerns, and poised for the inevitable complexities of categorial naming and genre discernment that await in the so often inscrutable, translation-resistant twenty-first century.

Knights and ladies, giants and dragons, tournaments, battles, quests and crusades are commonplace in stories for children. This book examines how late Victorians and Edwardians retold medieval narratives of chivalry--epics, romances, sagas, legends and ballads. Stories of Beowulf, Arthur, Gawain, St. George, Roland, Robin Hood and many more thrilled and instructed children, and encouraged adult reading. Lavish volumes and schoolbooks of the era featured illustrated texts, many by major artists. Children's books, an essential part of Edwardian publishing, were disseminated throughout the English-speaking world. Many are being reprinted today. This book examines related contexts of Medievalism expressed in painting, architecture, music and public celebrations, and the works of major authors, including Sir Walter Scott, Tennyson, Longfellow and William Morris. The book explores national identity expressed through literature, ideals of honor and valor in the years before World War I, and how childhood reading influenced 20th-century writers as diverse as C. S. Lewis, J. R. R. Tolkien, Siegfried Sassoon, David Jones, Graham Greene, Ian Fleming and John Le Carre.

Cervantes is regarded as the author of the first novel and the inventor of fiction. From its publication in 1605, Don Quixote--recently named the world's best book by authors from 54 countries--has been widely translated and imitated. Among its less acknowledged imitations are stories in children's literature. In context of English adaptation and critical response this book explores the noble and "mad" adventures retold for children by distinguished writers and artists in Edwardian books, collections, home libraries, schoolbooks and picture books. More recent adaptations including comics and graphic novels deviate from traditional retellings. All speak to the knight-errant's lasting influence and appeal to children.

In a series of essays readers will find information about modern scholarship on the subject of chivalry and various suggestions for ways to teach some familiar and unfamiliar chivalric materials. Short bibliographies are provided for teachers' further use.

Giants are a ubiquitous feature of medieval romance. As remnants of a British prehistory prior to the civilization established, according to the Historium regum Britannie, by Brutus and his Trojan followers, giants are permanently at odds with the chivalric culture of the romance world. Whether they are portrayed as brute savages or as tyrannical pagan lords, giants serve as a limit against which the chivalric hero can measure himself. In Outsiders: The Humanity and Inhumanity of Giants in Medieval French Prose Romance, Sylvia Huot argues that the presence of giants allows for fantasies of ethnic and cultural conflict and conquest, and for the presentation—and suppression—of alternative narrative and historical trajectories that might have made Arthurian Britain a very different place. Focusing on medieval French prose romance and drawing on aspects of postcolonial theory, Huot examines the role of giants in constructions of race, class, gender, and human subjectivity. She selects for study the well-known prose Lancelot and the prose Tristan, as well as the lesser known Perceforest, Le Conte du papegau, Guiron le Courtois, and Des Grantz Geants. By asking to what extent views of giants in Arthurian romance respond to questions that concern twenty-first-century readers, Huot demonstrates the usefulness of current theoretical concepts and the issues they raise for rethinking medieval literature from a modern perspective.

The Grail legends have in modern times been appropriated by a number of different scholarly schools of thought; their approaches are analysed here.