Arthurian Texts in their Historical and Social Context

Summary

The invitation to present a plenary lecture at the congress of the International Arthurian Society was naturally a distinct honour, but I hesitated before accepting. I feared that the conference theme that I was invited to discuss (and that constitutes the title of the present essay) might easily prove either too simple or too difficult. On the one hand, if we simply seek correspondences between specific literary artefacts and historical or cultural forces, we will undoubtedly find a great many, but that, by itself, will tell us little that was not already self-evident. Moreover, some of the connections may well be tenuous and a matter of coincidence rather than cause and effect. On the other hand, a serious effort to identify and analyse fundamental causal relationships on a large scale would be both a delicate and a huge undertaking, the subject for a very long book rather than a plenary paper or a published essay.

In addition, if we can discern, sometimes with relative ease, the influence of history on literature, influence in the opposite direction is ordinarily far more difficult to trace. In principle, we would all doubtless acknowledge that literature can influence history and social structures, but the instances of such phenomena are less easy to identify than are influences in the opposite direction: few texts, Arthurian or other, provoke a reaction such as the one unleashed, for example, by Salman Rushdie’s Satanic Verses – and few too are the Arthurian (or other) scholars who, I imagine, would welcome that particular reaction.

In the pages to follow, I shall do my best to deal with all three elements of my title – texts, history, and society – and to identify and discuss specific influences. However, instead of limiting myself to a particular group of texts or even a limited period, I propose to cast a much broader net. I have chosen to offer an unsystematic excursion through Arthurian chronicle and literary history extending, though with very large gaps, from the twelfth century to the present. I will begin, however, at what may seem a rather odd place: an Arthurian text by John Steinbeck.

Introduction: Steinbeck and modernized Malory

In the late 1950s Steinbeck set out to write a modernized Malory. He intended to reduce the length of the original and write in a language that was not archaic, perhaps even writing, he suggested, ‘in American’.