ABSTRACT

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.

part |73 pages

Resisting Tales

chapter |16 pages

Love, Honor, and the Exchange of Women in Yvain

Some Remarks on the Female Reader

chapter |22 pages

Rewriting Men's Stories

Enide's Disruptive Mouths

chapter |17 pages

“Ez ist ir g'artet von mir”

Queen Isolde and Princess Isolde in Gottfried von Strassburg's Tristan und Isolde 1

chapter |15 pages

Female Heroes, Heroines, and Counter-Heroes

Images of Women in Arthurian Tradition

part |57 pages

Story, Gender, and Culture

chapter |19 pages

Leaving Morgan Aside

Women, History, and Revisionism in Sir Gawain and the Green Knight

chapter |17 pages

Enchanted Ground

The Feminine Subtext in Malory

chapter |17 pages

“Le donne antiche e'cavalieri”

Women in the Italian Arthurian Tradition 1

part |69 pages

Fairies' Tales

chapter |17 pages

From the Lake to the Fountain

Lancelot and the Fairy Lover

chapter |11 pages

Arthur, Argante, and the Ideal Vision

An Exercise in Speculation and Parody

part |42 pages

Iseult and Guenevere in the Nineteenth Century

chapter |24 pages

Iseult of Brittany

A New Interpretation of Matthew Arnold's Tristram and Iseult

chapter |16 pages

In Defense of Guenevere

part |59 pages

Another Look

chapter |24 pages

The Woman's Eye

Four Modern Arthurian Illustrators

chapter |17 pages

Looking at Elaine

Keats, Tennyson, and the Directions of the Poetic Gaze

part |40 pages

Revisionary Tales

chapter |12 pages

Heterosexual Plots and Lesbian Subtexts

Toward a Theory of Lesbian Narrative Space in Marion Zimmer Bradley's The Mists of Avalon

chapter |14 pages

The First and Last Love

Morgan le Fay and Arthur