The Generic Features of Arthurian Romances

Asmita Saha

Deblina Chakraborty

Saamir Athar

Monojit Patra

Gunja Nandi

Aditya Bikram De

Professor Mahitosh Mandal

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Group number: 4

Topic: Generic features of Arthurian Romances

21 April 2017

Treading the Genre of Arthurian Romances: Its generic features and relevance

“A history without the imagination is a mutilated, disembodied history.”

                                                                                                                   -Jacques Le Goff

     The genre of Arthurian Romance is an extremely written and researched about genre. The Arthurian legend is multifaceted, a literature in itself, built up by romancers and poets during the Middle Ages in Europe. Even after all this time, the literature has survived the strains of time. Many authors have developed its themes or, conversely, turned it into a fairy tale for children. Several modern writers have satirized it, or given it new meanings, or tried to reconstitute a reality underlying it. Such questions are all valid, each in its way, and they have enlarged and enriched the legend. The essential creation, however, is medieval, and King Arthur’s Britain is an idealized medieval kingdom, a sort of chivalric Utopia.

Our paper aims to look into the nuances of the genre of Arthurian Romance and bring to light the certain generic features that underlie the texts in general and tie them into being analogous.

     The notion of a literary genre or as commonly called writing genre being distinctly different from another is usually determined by the tone, content, the technique used in the literary composition, and often, for fiction, the length. Literature, in the fashion of the classic three forms of ancient Greece, is divided into the poetry, drama and prose. Poetry incorporates the subgenres of lyric, epic, dramatic, the lyric including songs, odes, sonnets, elegies, ballads akin to shorter poetry and the dramatic poetry including comedy, tragedy, tragicomedy and melodrama. In a loose chronological order, the genres perhaps evolved as epics, tragedy, comedy and creative non-fiction, in the form of either prose or poetry. Drama and poetry are usually included under the genres of fictions, along with mythology, legends, folklores, fairy tales, fables, satires, romance, historical fictions and the later developing science fictions and fantasy, among others. Similarly, non-fictions include narratives, essays, biographies, auto-biographies and speech genres among others. 

     Aristotle's Poetics is perhaps the most mention worthy dissertation on poetry, its different forms, and the components that dictate the structure of a superior poem. However, his rather broad definition of poetry also comprises dithyrambic poetry, music and more importantly, epic, poetry, tragedy and comedy. There seems to be an undertone of derision in regards to his opinions on comedy, which supposedly, reveals a debased version of the average human. He is kinder towards tragedy and epic poetry, which supposedly aim to ennoble. To this end, he lays out the sin elements of a superior tragedy namely, plot, character, diction thought, spectacle and lyricism, wherein, the plot must encompass elements of ‘anagnorisis’ (recognition) and ‘peripeteia’ (reversal) while observing the unities of time, place and action, all aiming at the common goal of creating the effect of catharsis in the audience. Though tragedy and epic poetry appear similar, Aristotle subtly draws the distinction between the two. In the process, Aristotle deems tragedy the 'higher' form of art, refuting the general consensus of his time that glorified the epic poetry, designed for a cultivated audience, as opposed to tragedy, aimed at an inferior audience requiring gesticulations. Aristotle defends the prowess of tragedy by stating that tragedy can produce an affect as well as an indulgent pleasure through mere reading as opposed to any action.

     Aristotle defines poetry as an art of imitation, or 'mimesis', "a speaking picture", designed to “teach and delight” with a "universal consideration", opposed to history, that is preoccupied with verity. Plato’s decrying 'mimesis' and poetry in The Republic is, thus, refuted to some extent by Aristotle and further challenged by Sir Phillip Sidney's The Defense of Poesy, which seems to be addressed to Plato's The Republic and Stephen Corson's The School of Abuse. While they insist that the poets are merely capable of creating an imperfect, indiscriminate imitation of the ideal and find poetry and drama morally dubious and even denigrating, Sidney challenges this very notion by stating that poets, more so than historians, scholars in other disciplines and astronomers provide a vision of the ideal since they are under no constraint to depict the world "as it is", but at liberty to depict it as it "ought to be", delivering a golden, as opposed to "brazen". Thus, Sidney deems the poet a maker (from the Greek word 'poiein', meaning, 'to make') and even a 'vates' (Roman) suggestive of a "diviner, foreseer, or prophet….”

     Sidney traces back to the time when natural philosophy was sung in verses, in keeping with the traditions of orality, and historians too, made use of poetic devices, Sidney also suggests that the philosopher provides only abstract precepts in a manner "so hard of utterances and so misty to be conceived" (Sidney, 22), while the historian, lacking the precept, is bound to state facts as they were from old "mouse-eaten records both unappealing and ineffective to the understanding  of the ordinary people. Thus, the poet emerges as the best instructor, striking a happy balance between lessons and pleasure and the general and the particular. Sidney's defense of poetry, drama and other imaginative fiction concludes by dubbing poetry as the "most ancient and most fathering antiquity, as from whence other learnings have taken their beginnings" (Sidney, 51). He also reminds his readers that even the Holy Scripture, devoid of uncleanness incorporates poetic verses in it. The "laurel crown" that he bestows on the poets has since inspired eminent poets to come up with their own treatises. Samuel Taylor Coleridge's On Poesy Or Art and A Defence of Poetry by Percy Bysshe Shelley come more under the romantic strain.