Arthurian Literature XXX ed. by Elizabeth Archibald and David F. Johnson (review)

Abstract

elizabeth archibald and david f. johnson, eds., Arthurian Literature XXX. Cambridge: D.S. Brewer, 2013. Pp. xi, 169. isbn: 978-1-84384-362-7. $90.This latest volume in Boydell and Brewer's Arthurian Literature series offers expanded versions of eight papers delivered at the 23rd Triennial Congress of the International Arthurian Society. Together, these papers cover a wide-range of texts-from early Welsh romances through nineteenth-century editions of Geoffrey of Monmouth- and testify to Arthurian scholarship's flourishing interdisciplinarity as the field continues to build on traditional methodologies, such as philology and manuscript studies, while integrating postcolonial theory, cultural studies and ecocriticism.The collection begins with two essays that ask us to reconsider earlier readings of narratives in light of historical and cultural context. Helen Fulton's argument that Celtic magic is a 'fundamentally English colonialist identity whose strategy is to construct the alterity of Wales and Ireland as subaltern cultures' (3) clears the way for her examination of 'magic naturalism,' characterized by the 'agentless occurrence of wonders' (1) in medieval Welsh narratives. Her analysis of Culhwch and Olwen and Breuddwyd Rhonabwy centers on Arthur's relationship to this supernatural landscape in light of the political concerns of a people battling acquisitive Norman neighbors. While Cuhlwch and Olwen glorifies a Welsh past, a 'world with a legitimate king, who ...proves his supernatural credentials through his success in battles and challenges of the most challenging kind' (15), Breuddwyd Rhonabwy presents a parody of Arthur's sacral kingship in which the king 'has lost control' of both the supernatural world and 'the past as a narrative of Welsh greatness' (22). In the next essay, Michael Twomey revisits the perceived binary between civilization and the forest in Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, asserting that the forest and park surrounding Hautdesert depict 'a settled, managed environment-part of civilization rather than apart from it' (38). Thus, Sir Gawain and the Green Knight does not valorize a wild nature in opposition to Arthur's court but rather offers a nostalgia for a vanishing institution and a 'culturally determined and ultimately anthropocentric point of view toward the forest as a resource to be managed, controlled, and exploited by the few' (52).The next two essays examine what Richard Barber calls 'the greatest of the unread Arthurian romances,' Perceforest (55). …