{"id":30597,"date":"2015-11-20T06:30:27","date_gmt":"2015-11-19T17:30:27","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/helenlowe.info\/blog\/?p=30597"},"modified":"2015-11-19T23:08:21","modified_gmt":"2015-11-19T10:08:21","slug":"was-there-a-golden-age-of-arthurian-fantasy","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/helenlowe.info\/blog\/2015\/11\/20\/was-there-a-golden-age-of-arthurian-fantasy\/","title":{"rendered":"Was There A Golden Age of Arthurian Fantasy?"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"Sword<\/a>Recently, I posted on ‘The Matter Of Britain” — the Medieval term for Arthurian cycle — and its influence on Fantasy fiction in two posts, one looking at adult Fantasy<\/a>, the other at works for Junior and YA readers<\/a>.<\/p>\n

In the first post, I reflected on “the swathe of Arthurian-based works for adult readers that dominated 1970s and 1980s Fantasy literature\u2014with the theme continuing to maintain traction through into the 1990s.\u201d<\/em><\/p>\n

The Junior\/YA fiction had a slightly wider sweep, with The Sword in the Stone<\/em><\/strong> published in 1938, but there was still a solid swathe of publications from the early 1960s through to the 1990s.<\/p>\n

\"Connecticut<\/a>I believe it was<\/em> a golden era for Arthurian stories, with so many published in such relatively close proximity — but when I look back a little further, to the nineteenth century, I realised that “The Matter of Britain” also enjoyed another heydey then.<\/p>\n

Mark Twain, for example, published A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court<\/em><\/strong> in 1889, while Tennyson was writing his famous and popular Idylls of the King<\/em><\/strong> between 1859 and 1885. William Morris also wrote a poem titled Sir Galahad, a Christmas Mystery<\/em><\/strong>, in 1858.<\/p>\n

\"Mist<\/a>So although the Arthurian stories are always with us, from time to time they appear to go through periods of greater-than-usual public popularity. So I would love to see a study that looked at whether there are any detectable trends in common between the two eras …<\/p>\n

The one thing that seems certain, however, is that we will keep telling and retelling the Arthurian legends — and that they will enjoy periods of intense popularity again.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Recently, I posted on ‘The Matter Of Britain” — the Medieval term for Arthurian cycle — and its influence on Fantasy fiction in two posts, one looking at adult Fantasy, the other at works for Junior and YA readers. In the first post, I reflected on “the swathe of Arthurian-based works for adult readers that […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[30,10],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-30597","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-epicfantasy","category-general"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/helenlowe.info\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/30597","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/helenlowe.info\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/helenlowe.info\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/helenlowe.info\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/helenlowe.info\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=30597"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/helenlowe.info\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/30597\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":30602,"href":"https:\/\/helenlowe.info\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/30597\/revisions\/30602"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/helenlowe.info\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=30597"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/helenlowe.info\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=30597"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/helenlowe.info\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=30597"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}