The Idylls of the King is one of the indisputably great long poems in the English language. Yet Tennyson's doom-laden prophecy of the fall of the West has been dismissed as a Victorian-Gothic fairy tale. John D. Rosenberg maintains that no poem of comparable magnitude has been so misread or so maligned in the twentieth century as Tennyson's symbolist masterpiece.
In The Fall of Camelot the author calls into question the modernist orthodoxy that rejects all of Victorian poetry as a Waste Land and ignores the overriding importance of Tennyson to the development of Yeats, T. S. Eliot,and the symbolists. Far from being an escapist medieval charade, the Idylls offers an apocalyptic prevision of the nightmare of modern history. Concealed under the exquisitely romantic surface of the verse is a world of obsessive sensuality and collapsing values that culminates in the "last dim weird battle the West." Perhaps the subtlest anatomy of the failure of ideality in our literature, the Idylls is not only about hazards of mistaking illusion for reality; it dramatically enacts those dangers, ensnaring the reader in the same delusions that maim and destroy the characters.
Rosenberg shows that Tennyson has created a new genre whose true originality criticism has yet to perceive. By employing landscape as a symbolic extension of character, Tennyson obliterates the gap between self and scene and frees himself from bondage toconventional narration.
Throughout the Idylls charactercannot be extricated from setting orsymbol, and neither has substanceapart from the narrative in which it isenmeshed. In essence, the narrativeis a sequence of symbols protracted intime, the symbolism a kind ofcondensed narration.
"Timescape" in the Idylls, like landscape, serves to bind all eventsof the poem into a continuous present.Arthur is at once a Christ figure andSun-King whose career parallels that ofhis kingdom, waxing and waningwith the annual cycle. At the heart ofArthur's story lies the dual cycle of hispassing and promised return.Incorporating this cycle into itsstructure, the Idylls is itself a kind ofliterary second coming of Arthur, aresurrection in Victorian England of thelong sequence of Arthuriads extendingback before Malory and forwardthrough Spenser, Dryden, Scott, andTennyson.
A provocative new approach to medieval culture
In Medieval Identity Machines, Jeffrey J. Cohen examines the messiness, permeability, and perversity of medieval bodies, arguing that human identity always exceeds the limits of the flesh. Combining critical theory with a rigorous reading of medieval texts, Cohen asks if the category “human” isn’t too small to contain the multiplicity of identities. As such, this book is the first to argue for a “posthuman” Middle Ages and to make extensive use of the philosophical writings of Gilles Deleuze to rethink the medieval.
Among the topics that Cohen covers are the passionate bond between men and horses in chivalric training; the interrelation of demons, celibacy, and colonialism in an Anglo-Saxon saint’s life; Lancelot’s masochism as envisioned by Chrétien de Troyes; the voice of thunder echoing from Margery Kempe; and the fantasies that sustained some dominant conceptions of race. This tour of identity—in all its fragility and diffusion—illustrates the centrality of the Middle Ages to theory as it enhances our understanding of self, embodiment, and temporality in the medieval world.READERS
Browse our collection.
PUBLISHERS
See BiblioVault's publisher services.
STUDENT SERVICES
Files for college accessibility offices.
UChicago Accessibility Resources
home | accessibility | search | about | contact us
BiblioVault ® 2001 - 2024
The University of Chicago Press