Mapping Malory Regional Identities And National Geographies In Le Morte Darthur

"While most criticism has treated romance's use of place as fantastic and essentially meaningless, our book argues that geography is a crucial element in Sir Thomas Malory's Morte Darthur; our analysis of the concerns of nation, region, borders, and identity in this text sheds new light on how Malory both understood the 'England' in which he was writing and how he imagined the 'Arthurian Community' he depicts in his text. The great knights in Le Morte Darthur come from regions where sovereignty is a vexed issue, and their rivalries, rather than being fictions of individuals, capture significant political divisions of the fifteenth century. Our work thus not only provides fundamental reinterpretations of Malory's book, but also places it in larger discussions of how regional and national identities developed at the end of the Middle Ages and the beginning of the Early Modern period" --