Arthurian Literature Portal

“Whoso pulleth out this sword of this stone and anvil, is rightwise king born of all England.” This series explores the culminating masterpiece of medieval Arthurian literature: Sir Thomas Malory’s Le Morte Darthur (1470). Drawing together the most noteworthy and celebrated threads of earlier versions, Malory tells Arthur’s story from boyhood to death in a narrative sequence that would influence later retellings for centuries, and in striking language that, for many, defines the Arthurian tradition.

Working our way from beginning to end, the series covers all eight books or “tales” of Malory’s text in five modules. In addition to carefully reading the complete work, the series also provides context on Malory’s life and imprisonment during the Wars of the Roses, his book’s first publication in 1485 by English printer and editor William Caxton, and the remarkable twenty-first century discovery of the “Winchester Manuscript,” a now-standard but hitherto-unknown version of Malory’s text by medievalist Eugene Vinaver.

C.S. Lewis is one of the most prolific and influential writers of the 20th century. And yet, in his early career as an Oxford don, he viewed himself as a failed poet. Moreover, his most canonical and transformational writing happened during the most stress-filled periods of his life. This short course allows students to peek into the writing life of C.S. Lewis. Our goal is to see through the lines of printed text by visiting the letters and archival remains of Lewis in a virtual setting. Most of C.S. Lewis's papers remain undigitized and unpublished, available only locally at archives in North America and England.

As Professor Brenton Dickieson has visited these archives, he is able to invite students to appreciate C.S. Lewis's writing life by looking at the way that he consciously and unconsciously built his literary career. This course is for writers who are developing their own habits and literary life-prints, as well as folks who are curious about C.S. Lewis's life beyond the biographies and bestselling books.

We are not doing text close readings, but looking at the “paratextual” information available to us: writing drafts, letters, diary entries, manuscripts and typescripts, title, and the like.

Week 1: Lewis: Pen, Ink, Paper
• C.S. Lewis’s Single-jointed Self-Conception as a Writer
• What Lewis Says about his Writing Habits
• Legendary Bonfires, Stuffed Dolls, and American Suckers: A Story of Lewis’s Papers and Manuscripts
• The Screwtape MS. Story: Part 1

Week 2: Leaves, Bombs, Stains
• The Screwtape MS. Story: Part 2
• “Villainous Handwriting”: Charlie Starr’s Lewis Handwriting and Rough Draft vs. Fair Draft
• Reconsidering the Lindskoog Affair with Manuscript Evidence of “The Dark Tower”

Week 3: Joy, Theft, Death
• “The Quest of Bleheris”: Lewis’s Teenage Novel

Week 4:
• Is it True that Lewis Wrote in a Single Draft?
• A Grief Observed
• Tumbling Through the Wardrobe: The Discovery of Narnia
• Arthurian Torso
• A New Sketch of Lewis’s Writing Process(es)

Note: This course includes a significant amount of visual material on the screen. Please contact the SPACE team if you have visual accessibility requirements and we will do everything we can to accommodate.

This course offers an in-depth look at the first complete “historical” narrative of the reign of King Arthur, Geoffrey’s Historia Regum Britanniae. Almost a quarter of the total work, this crucial first account of Arthur includes Arthur’s magically-contrived conception, his conquest of Rome, and his overthrown and death at the hands of his nephew Mordred. This course also looks at the “battle of books” that followed in the wake of Geoffrey’s work, with some contemporaries arguing that Geoffrey simply made the whole thing up, and others rallying to Geoffrey’s (and Arthur’s) defense.

The module will follow an 8-session structure as shown below:

Outline	8-Session Structure
Week 1	Lecture 1: The “Historical” Arthur before Geoffrey
	Discussion 1: HRB, Prologue and Book VI: Britain in Chaos
Week 2	Lecture 2: Merlin the Historian: Prophesy as History and Vice-Versa
	Discussion 2: HRB, Book VIII: Death of a Tyrant; The Birth of a Hero
Week 3	Lecture 3: The Anarchy of Stephen: The Politics of Geoffrey’s Early Readership
	Discussion 3: HRB, Books IV – X: The Rise and Fall of King Arthur
Week 4	Lecture 4: The Battle of the Books: Geoffrey’s Contested History
	Discussion 4: HRB, Books XI – XII: Goodbye Britain, Hello England!

This course tracks Lancelot's development from hero of a medieval romance (part tale of adventure, part comedy of manners) to center of a political and moral tragedy. We look in detail at three texts: Chrétien de Troyes's Lancelot: The Knight of the Cart (c. 1180), Thomas Malory's Le Morte Darthur (1470) and Tennyson's Idylls of the King (1859).

Sir Lancelot, as everyone knows, is Arthur’s best and bravest knight—and also, the lover of Arthur’s wife, Guinevere. Examining this pivotal irony of the Arthurian tradition, this course tracks the development of Lancelot as a both character and a literary concept across three major works:

In Lancelot: The Knight of the Cart, master of French Arthurian romance, Chrétien de Troyes, invents a hero who loves Queen Guinevere beyond all bounds of reason—so much that he will face deadly perils and (worse yet) social humiliation to prove his devotion.

Sir Thomas Malory’s late medieval “Tale of Lancelot and Elayne” (part of his sprawling epic, Le Morte Darthur) introduces a would-be rival for Lancelot’s affections in the form of Elayne, the Fair Maid of Astolat. While retaining a few comic touches from earlier versions, this retelling cannot escape the doomed nature of Lancelot’s affair with the Queen.

Finally, Alfred Lord Tennyson’s poem “Lancelot and Elayne” (part of his Idylls of the King) depicts Lancelot and Guinevere’s betrayal of their king as the moral rot at the foundation of a perfect but unsustainable society—and in so doing, reveals a Victorian sense of worlds away from Chrétien’s light-hearted original.

This module contains a mixture of lecture and discussion, with one lecture for each of the three works, and the rest of the meetings focusing on discussion.

The module will follow an 8-session structure as shown below:

Outline	8-Session Structure
Week 1	Lecture 1: Chretien de Troyes and the Creation of Lancelot
	Discussion 1: Lancelot, The Knight of the Cart (first half)
Week 2	Lecture 2: Courtly Romance and Comedy of Manners
	Discussion 2: Lancelot, The Knight of the Cart (second half)
Week 3	Lecture 3: Sir Thomas Malory: Knight Prisoner
	Discussion 3: Le Morte Darthur, “The Tale of Lancelot and Elayne”
Week 4	Lecture 4:Tennyson’s Tragic Arthurian Vision
	Discussion 4: Idylls of the King: “Lancelot and Elayne”

The story of the Holy Grail that was sought by King Arthur’s knights begins with this tale: Chretien de Troyes’s “Perceval, or the Story of the Grail.” This coming-of-age story follows the adventures of Perceval, as he moves from rustic ignorance of his own identity into full-fledged knighthood. As series of mistakes, triumphs, and misadventures leads him almost (but not quite) to the discovery of that most holy of relics. His journey of spiritual understanding, like the quest for the Holy Grail itself, remains incomplete as Chretien’s unfinished romance breaks off in mid-sentence. This course, however, continues Perceval’s story through the numerous continuations of additions by which different authors brought to the tale within a century of its first appearance.

The module will follow an 8-session structure as shown below:

Outline	8-Session Structure
Week 1	Lecture 1: Details to be determined.
	Discussion 1: TBD
Week 2	Lecture 2: Details to be determined.
	Discussion 2: TBD
Week 3	Lecture 3: Details to be determined.
	Discussion 3:TBD
Week 4	Lecture 4: Details to be determined.
	Discussion 4: TBD

J.R.R. Tolkien famously 'found' his legendarium, translating and editing The Red Book of Westmarch for his twentieth century readers. This is not the first time an author has 'forged' a 'lost' literary history as James Macpherson's 'Ossian' documents from the 1760s started a craze for forgeries. Thomas Chatterton's Rowley and Turgot manuscripts similarly fed off the Ossian controversy while questioning what it really meant to 'forge' a document.

The module will follow an 8-session structure as shown below:

Outline	8-Session Structure
Week 1	Lecture 1: The 1760s, the Age of Forgery
	Discussion 1: Which Red Book are we reading?
Week 2	Lecture 2: The Growth of Romantic Nationalism
	Discussion 2: The Book of Lost Tales: a mythology for which England?
Week 3	Lecture 3: Oral Traditions: Immortality and Youth
	Discussion 3: Vocalising Myth and History
Week 4	Lecture 4: Textual Traditions: Mortal Anxiety and Tangible History
	Discussion 4: Writing myth and history