Review: Susan L. Austin (ed.), Arthurian Legend in the Twentieth and Twenty-first Centuries (2021)

Susan L. Austin (ed.), Arthurian Legend in the Twentieth and Twenty-first Centuries (Wilmington: Vernon Press, 2021).

The very title of this new collection may leave experienced readers raising eyebrows. Arthuriana, after all, is a complex tradition with a long history of adaptation and remediation, so it might be difficult to imagine that a single book could cover two entire centuries of these practices and the texts they produce. However, although the title does not suggest this explicitly, editor Susan L. Austin does introduce a specific intervention into this body of work. Readers of Arthurian texts in the 20th and 21st centuries, Austin suggests, both “need” and seek depictions of rulers who utilize their power in egalitarian ways and in service of others.

Austin and contributors offer a sample of Arthurian-inspired texts that challenge notions of power and question ways in which such power can be best utilised. The Christianity-focused, highly gendered, and definitely monarchic values of early Arthurian literature, such as Thomas Mallory’s Mort d’ Arthur, are not what tends to shine through in more recent retellings of these legends, and neither are the largely white casts or overly simplistic portrayals of race, gender, and social class so evident in many Arthurian adaptations preceding those explored here. Instead, the works examined in this collection reveal that more recent texts extrapolating from Arthurian legend and its period-specific imagination of “a fair and just world” (10) often utilize their intertextuality to reimagine what fairness, inclusivity, and justice might look like today – all highly relevant questions for a global society currently grappling with rising authoritarianism and the ongoing ramifications of colonialization and imperialism, among other challenges.

Arthurian Legend is a wide-ranging collection whose contributors identify and discuss Arthurian inspirations found in a variety of genres, media, and writing traditions. Literary genres represented here range from John Steinbeck’s translation-become-unfinished-novel The Acts of King Arthur and His Noble Knights (n.d.) to fantasy works including Kazuo Ishiguro’s The Buried Giant (2015) and J.K. Rowling’s ubiquitous Harry Potter series (1997-2007). Meanwhile, media include television shows such as the BBC’s Merlin (2008-2012) and anime with Gen Urobuchi’s Fate/Zero (2012), as well as comic books from DC and Silent Devil, and more. Between this variety and Austin’s own relatively short introduction framing it, Arthurian Legend is neither really an introduction to Arthurian tradition nor quite a full overview of the many texts produced between 1900 and the present that draw from this tradition. What it is, though, is a focused exploration of how certain Arthurian texts reach new audiences, secularize old myths, and most of all, highlight and challenge assumptions about power, its wielders, and its uses.

One exciting attribute of this collection is its focus on Arthurian reworkings in mainly niche texts (and genres). Limited-run comics like Camelot 3000 (1982-1985) and Dracula vs. King Arthur (2005-2006), the Fate/Zero anime (2011-2012), and the Disney Channel Original Movie Avalon High (2010) are analysed here, rather than some of the more well-known examples such as T.H. White’s Once and Future King (1958), Disney’s animated The Sword in the Stone (1963) and Marion Zimmer Bradley’s Mists of Avalon (1983). However, this same range also leads to one of the collection’s faults: its lack of further framing or synthesis. Austin’s introduction provides the only place where the essays are put in conversation with one another, and even that is limited because Austin also needs this space to set up the project as a whole. Further, the navigation of this collection would have been improved by an arrangement of content by time period, shared themes, or even media.

Despite the shortcomings that the range of texts dictates, the collection practices what it preaches: contributors show diverse examples of power that might be meaningful and impactful to different audiences. For instance, Sarah Gordon’s opening chapter “Kids and Kings: Postmodern Nostalgia and Youthful Arthurian Cinematic Retellings” establishes several important concepts that I found reoccurring throughout the collection. Gordon’s analysis of the movies Avalon High (2010) and The Kid Who Would Be King (2019) zeroes in on the idea that cultural producers will find certain motifs, themes, and names from Arthurian material “familiar” enough to keep them in place for pseudo-nostalgic effect. Gordon also argues that Arthuriana as a body of work is ideal for the contemporary cinematic market and its affinity for pastiches, reboots, and spin-offs (12-13), particularly when “historical accuracy or textual authority are never the goal… [because] postmodern nostalgia does not value originality as much as it does familiarity” (14-15). In the two child/teen-oriented films that Gordon discusses, postmodern nostalgia enables young protagonists to grapple with sexism, racism, bullying, and other forms and effects of misused power in ways that are simultaneously familiar to target audiences while also being explicitly tied to a legendary framework that lends these “smaller,” more everyday challenges a greater legitimacy and gravitas than they might have on their own.

The two chapters that immediately follow Gordon’s also build upon similar concepts, exploring how names, narratives, and preoccupations recognizable from Arthurian legend are utilized in new media forms. Carl Sell in his “Camelot 3000 and Dracula vs. King Arthur: The Uses of Limited-Run Comics as Updates of the Arthurian Legend for Contemporary Readers” explores how the eponymous comics demonstrate specific possibilities inherent to the “self-contained” nature of limited-run comics vs. entire series. Sell draws from Jason Tondro’s Superheroes of the Round Table (2011) as he points out that although comics as a medium still grapples with a gendered gaze created for presumably male readerships, examples such as Camelot 3000 (1982-1985) are able to introduce complexities, such as the early (for comics) example of transgender identity with the reborn Tristan (45). Sell further investigates the sci-fi setting of Camelot 3000 and the horror-inspired style and story of Dracula vs. King Arthur (2007) to demonstrate that limited-run comics can use familiar genre conventions – including their own of art, pacing, dialogue, and so on – in order “to appeal to a wider audience than only those who are familiar with Arthurian legends” (43). Sell’s expertise in this particular intersection of neo-medievalist narrative and popular culture is evident throughout this chapter, appealing to scholars of fantasy.

Meanwhile, Tracey Thomas’s chapter “The Fate of Artoria: Contextually Exploring Gender, Narrative, and Conflict in Fate/Zero” offers an admirable and much-deserved foray into anime. As Thomas so aptly notes, Japanese adaptations of Arthurian tradition add further layers of complexity into the mix of nostalgic need and postmodern desire. Although the chapter’s length and its primary focus on Fate/Zero likely prevent a more in-depth discussion of this point, Thomas is broadly correct to point out that Japanese content creators often approach Christianity, a central concern of Arthurian narratives such as the Grail quest, “for literary effect rather than for philosophical debate: [as] symbols, more than syllogisms” (59). Likewise, Thomas’s observation that Western adaptations’ typical “importance on Arthurian motifs, such as Excalibur” (59) is not always present here, or at least to the same degree or in the same context(s). Gen Urobuchi’s Fate/Zero manga (2006) and anime (2011-2012) offer an apt illustration of these changes: in this setting, heroic spirits or “Servants” compete against one another in cycles of an ongoing “Holy Grail War” that is fought among the human magicians who summon them. Here, then, the Holy Grail signifies power and glory without its usual associations with Christ and Excalibur is more important as a magical weapon than as a king-making one. These are all noteworthy changes even before Thomas explores how Artoria, the anime’s Arthurian figure, is also female, competes against all-male peers, espouses peace over the violence her peers extol, and does not feature in any love triangles. Despite some of Thomas’s claims seeming overly sweeping, such as her assertion that “The role of women in [the older] Arthurian narratives is, at best missing to minimal in presence, to at worst, misogynistic” (57), this chapter is still an important contribution that might appeal especially to animation scholars.

 One of the strongest chapters is delivered by Adrienne Major, who analyses oppositional tropes and contextual parallels – both social and governmental – in “the four big screen, live action productions of King Arthur’s legend produced over the turn of the century,” demonstrating “how they both explicate and contain the defining myths of their political moments” (144). In rapid succession, Major connects John Boorman’s Excalibur (1981) with the 1970s tide of “rugged individualism” and economic downturns in both Britain and the US, Jerry Zucker’s First Knight (1995) with the US-led Desert Shield and Desert Storm campaigns, Antoine Fuqua’s King Arthur (2004) to 9/11, and the “grifter king” Arthur of Guy Ritchie’s King Arthur, Legend of the Sword (2017) with the rise of Donald Trump and Boris Johnson on their respective national stages. With these readings, Major returns to the collection’s reoccurring interest in power, nostalgia, and legitimacy, arguing that these particular Arthurian films each “reimagine a mythical past with the anxieties and wishes of the present imaginary” (143). It is an intriguing argument and Major supports it with persuasive readings of each film: likewise, her observation that these are the main blockbuster adaptations of Arthuriana from this time period is compelling evidence for a more sombre version of the postmodern nostalgia that Gordon identifies earlier. And although Major makes strong use of the space she has for this chapter, I would have happily read an entire monograph on this topic.

While these chapters alone make this collection worth picking up, Arthurian Legends is not without its limitations. The editing could have been tighter in several places, and some chapters offered more unique ideas and arguments than others. The lack of an organizing framework also stood out, as did the way in which certain chapters deployed more sweeping generalizations and unfounded assumptions about Arthurian legend than I would have expected of a non-introductory collection on the subject. Further, Michael Torregrossa’s use of the term “whitewashing” – even briefly – in his chapter “Merlin the White(washed): The Entertainment Industry’s Evasion of Merlin’s Demonic Heritage" to describe a particular elision of Merlin's character stood out as a particularly questionable choice. Given that this term has moved away from its early meaning of covering up unpleasant facts – which Torregrossa may have intended here – to now describe the ways in which media properties recast black characters and others of colour as white, or else prioritize white experience over all others, Torregrossa’s use of it in tandem with demonic heritage seems particularly ill-informed.

Despite these shortcomings, Arthurian Legend in the Twentieth and Twenty-first Centuries offers an interesting perspective on several– and many understudied – retellings of Arthurian stories. Its focus on structures and wielders of power is a valuable one, even if the collection itself sometimes requires readers to delve a bit before unearthing it. All things considered, Arthurian Legends may be of the most interest to advanced students of Arthuriana and to scholars of visual media interested in crossovers between their field and older storytelling traditions.

**Article published: May 6, 2022**

Biography 

Maria Alberto is a PhD candidate at the University of Utah, where her research interests include adaptation, digital media, and popular culture. Her recent work includes essays in Mythlore and Transformative Works and Cultures, as well as forthcoming chapters in collections on contemporary romance, fan studies methodologies, and queer readings of Tolkien's legendarium. She is currently working on her dissertation, which explores connections between adaptations of fantasy texts and audiences' differing uses of the term “canon”. @MariaKAlberto (Twitter)

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