The Comic Image of the Courtly Love Ideals in Le Morte D’Arthur by Sir Thomas Malory

• Authors: Mrówka, Aleksandra

Abstracts

EN

The Arthurian legends have fascinated and inspired people for ages. Le Morte D’Arthur by Sir Thomas Malory is one of the best compilations of the stories about King Arthur and his peers. This romance deals with the enchanting world of knightly rituals and the ideals of the chivalric code. It is not a typical romance blindly glorifying the medieval world, though. Written in the time when these ideals are passing, the prose is dominated on the one hand, by melancholy and sentiment, but on the other, by irony and ambiguity. Malory seems to question the chivalric code through inconsistencies of his characters’ behaviour, and absurdity of some situations they are involved in. The paper will focus on the ambivalent and comic picture of the courtly love ideals in Malory’s prose. The main source of failure of some of the Arthurian knights in this aspect of knightly life is the clash between the real chivalric practice and the imagined ideals they pursue.

Keywords

EN

courtly love; Malory; Arthur; knight; satire

• Publisher: Uniwersytet Łódzki. Wydawnictwo Uniwersytetu Łódzkiego
• Journal: Analyses/Rereadings/Theories: A Journal Devoted to Literature, Film and Theatre
• Year: 2014
• Volume: 2
• Issue: 1

Dates

published

2014

Contributors

author

Mrówka, Aleksandra

other

Jagiellonian University

other

Aleksandra Mrówka is a doctoral candidate at the Jagiellonian University in Cracow, where she is a member of the Department of the 20th and 21st-Century British Literature and Culture in the Institute of English Philology. English medieval romance, with emphasis on the Celtic legend about King Arthur and the Knights of the Round Table, belongs to the scope of her academic interests. Her PhD dissertation is a research on the female experience of magic and the supernatural in this fascinating literary genre

Identifiers

URI

http://hdl.handle.net/11089/22709