University of Pennsylvania ScholarlyCommons Publicly Accessible Penn Dissertations 2013 Heirs of the Round Table: French Arthurian Fiction from 1977 to the Present Anne N. Bornschein University of Pennsylvania,
[email protected] Follow this and additional works at: https://repository.upenn.edu/edissertations Part of the Medieval Studies Commons, Modern Literature Commons, and the Other Languages, Societies, and Cultures Commons Recommended Citation Bornschein, Anne N., "Heirs of the Round Table: French Arthurian Fiction from 1977 to the Present" (2013). Publicly Accessible Penn Dissertations. 836. https://repository.upenn.edu/edissertations/836 This paper is posted at ScholarlyCommons. https://repository.upenn.edu/edissertations/836 For more information, please contact
[email protected]. Heirs of the Round Table: French Arthurian Fiction from 1977 to the Present Abstract While the English-speaking tradition has dominated the production of Arthurian-themed materials since the nineteenth-century Arthurian Revival, there is evidence that the publication of modern Arthurian fiction in French has enjoyed a major upswing over the past few decades. Notable contributions include Michel Rio's Merlin-Morgane-Arthur trilogy, Jacques Roubaud and Florence Delay's ten-volume cycle Graal théâtre, a half-dozen fantasy novels about the origins of the Arthurian world by Jean-Louis Fetjaine, and medievalist Michel Zink's young adult novel Déodat, ou la transparence. Such texts are deeply anchored in the medieval tradition, invested in co-opting the flavor of medieval source texts at the level of narration as well as plot. Textual genealogies are frequently thematized in modern French Arthuriana by authors who credit a medieval parentage, whether through a narratorial intervention or paratexual references.