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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.
List of contents
Foreword, Seeking Guinevere, Sharan Newman * Introduction, Thelma S. Fenster * Love, Honor, and the Exchange of Women in Yvain: Some Remarks on the Female Reader, Roberta L. Krueger * Rewriting Men's Stories: Enide's Disruptive Mouths, E. Jane Burns * ez ist ir g'artet von mir: Queen Isolde and Princess Isolde in Gottfried von Strassburg's Tristan und Isolde, Ann-Marie Rasmussen * Female Heroes, Heroines, and Counter-Heroes, Maureen Fries * Leaving Morgan Aside: Women, History, and Revisionism in Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, Sheila Fisher * Enchanted Ground: The Feminine Subtext in Malory, Geraldine Heng * Le donne antiche e' cavalieri: Arthurian Women in the Italian Tradition, Regina Psaki * Fairy Godmothers and Fairy Lovers, Laurence Harf-Lancer * Chief Lady of the Lake in Malory's Le Morte D'Arthur, Sue Ellen Holbrook * Arthur, Argante, and the Ideal Vision: An Exercise in Speculation and Parody,Judith, H. Anderson * In Defense of Guenevere, Carole Silver * Iseult of Brittany: A New Interpretation of Matthew Arnold's Tristram and Iseult, Barbara Fass Leavy * Looking at Elaine: Keats, Tennyson, and the Directions of the Poetic Gaze, Constance Hassett and James Richardson * Julia Margaret Cameron's Photographic Illustrations to Alfred Tennyson's The Idylls of the King, Joanne Lukitsh * The Woman's Eye: Four Modern Arthurian Illustrators, Muriel Whitaker * Heterosexual Plots and Lesbian Subtexts: Marion Zimmer Bradley's The Mists of Avalon, Marilyn Farwell * The First and Last Love: Morgan le Fay and Arthur, Raymond Thompson
About the author
Thelma S. Fenster, Norris J. Lacy
Summary
This collection gathers recent criticism focusing on female characters in Arthurian literature from the Middle Ages to the present.
Report
"A useful and interesting collection." -- Arthuriana
"Fester...has done an excellent job of selecting articles to be included in the volume, balancing studies on medieval texts with those of nineteenth- and twentieth- century works, and including articles that focus on French, German, English, and Italian literature...the volume will no doubt be a useful addition to the library of many Arthurian scholars." -- Studies in the Age of Chaucer
"Welcome addition to the rapidiliy expanding shelves os Arthurian criticism." -- Speculum
