Reinventing King Arthur

In her reassessment of the remaking of the Arthurian past in nineteenth-century British fiction and non-fiction, Inga Bryden examines the Victorian Arthurian Revival as a cultural phenomenon, offering insights into the relationship between social, cultural, religious, and ethnographic debates of the period and a wide range of texts. The book starts with a review of the historical evidence available to Victorian writers and representations of Arthur by historians. The author then connects Victorian accounts of Arthur's quest to contemporary debates about 'origins'; Arthur's knights to attitudes towards chivalry and love; and Arthur's transportation to Avalon to Victorian commemoration of the dead. She engages not only with well-known Arthurian texts by Tennyson, Swinburne, Morris, and Rossetti, but with lesser-known works by Bulwer-Lytton, Robert Stephen Hawker, Sebastian Evans, Diana Maria Mulock, Christiana Douglas and Joseph Shorthouse.