The Monstrous Fantastic Conference Paper Abstracts - International ...

98. (F/SF) Medieval Tales Re-told Captiva BChair: Timothy H. EvansWestern Kentucky UniversityThree Monsters in Transformation: Grendel, Grendel’s Mother, and the Dragon of Michael Crichton’s Eaters of the DeadMarie NelsonUniversity of FloridaThe dragon of John Gardner’s Grendel had it right when he told Grendel the reason for his existence was to scare men to glory, but he couldhave added that to succeed the monster had to be sufficiently fear inspiring — or monstrous — to accomplish his purpose. This reading ofMichael Crichton’s re-telling of the Beowulf story with reference to parallels from his source gives attention to the power of Grendel, Grendel’smother, and Korgon the dragon to inspire fear, and concludes that Grendel’s mother, though she, as an old woman, is hardly the “terriblemother” as Jane Chance defines the type in Woman as Hero in Old English Literature, is the monster whose confrontation leads to therecognition Buliwyf receives from his people.“Our Good Days in Sherwood Are Done…”: E. Charles Vivian’s Robin Hood as a Lost World FantasyKristin NooneUniversity of California, RiversideIn his Science Fiction After 1900, Brooks Landon observes that, in contrast to the optimism and exoticism of the American pulps, Britishspeculative fiction of the early twentieth century “was much less confident and adventurous,” a more serious and even dystopian subgenre ofpulp science fiction and science fantasy. E. Charles Vivian (Charles Henry Cannell), the editor of three British pulp magazines and author ofnumerous supernatural and “lost world” scientific fantasies from 1907 to 1947, stands at the forefront of this movement; but though Vivian hasreceived some attention from science fiction scholars in recent years, his Robin Hood novel (Robin Hood and His Merry Men, 1927), tends to becritically neglected, or at most noted as one of the influences on the television series Robin of Sherwood. The aim of my project is thus twofold:to bring Vivian’s Robin Hood tale into dialogue with his other works, especially the fantasies A King There Was and Fields of Sleep, writtenroughly around the same time; but also to read his Robin Hood as a complicating part of that science-fantasy, lost-world, dystopian tradition. Inhis Medieval Identity Machines, Jeffrey Jerome Cohen reconceptualizes medieval identity as assemblage: a knight, for example, is not just aman, but the man plus his armor plus his horse plus his weaponry and training: a hybrid, composite figure, much like the science-fictional posthuman,or cyborg, described by Katherine Hayles. This connection offers a useful way to read Vivian’s medievalism: Robin Hood becomes RobinHood only when he is part of the forest, attached to his bow, and so on, in much the same way that the narrator of Vivian’s A King There Was(1926) only identifies himself in terms of the stories he knows how to tell. A King There Was ends with an apocalyptic flood; Robin Hood andHis Merry Men ends with the death of Robin Hood. But in both novels survivors remain to tell the stories of glorious deeds and great heroes;though the fantastic world itself may be lost, Vivian’s stories argue, the memory need not be: the stories become pieces of our own assembledidentities, and thus there is hope even in dystopia. Vivian’s work thus takes an important step in the rewriting of Robin Hood as part of thefantastic tradition, particularly, in this case, as a form of lost world that nevertheless can be accessed through the act of fantasizing.Every Knight Has His Dawn: Victorian and Medieval Chivalric Traditions in The Once and Future KingEmerson Storm Fillman RichardsUniversity of FloridaT. H. White’s quadrilogy The Once and Future King focuses on Arthur’s attempt to codify chivalry, create a Round Table, unite his kingdom.Having written a thesis on Malory’s Le Morte d’Arthur at Queen’s College of Cambridge University, White was in a position to showcase hisknowledge of strands of the Arthurian tradition, from the incipient Matière de Bretagne, to Malory’s work, through to Tennyson’s re-adaptationin The Idylls of the King in the nineteenth century. In this presentation, I examine White’s quadrilogy as an example of the contrast of“Medieval” and “Victorian” elements of chivalric code and the narratives of the careers of knights in the Arthurian tradition, I also sketch therelevance of these elements for subsequent retellings of the tradition. In his letters to his mentor, White describes certain influences on hisworks. Using these documents, and my own analysis of primary texts, I will consider Sir Gawaine and his clan (his brothers Gaheris, Gareth andAgravaine) as “medieval” knights in contrast with Sir Lancelot and his ‘family’ (his son, Galahad, his lover, Guinevere and his wife, Elaine) as a“Victorian” representation of chivalry. The medieval aspects of chivalry will be informed primarily by Thomas Malory’s Le Morte D’Arthur andthe “Victorian” concept will come from Alfred Lord Tennyson’s The Idylls of the King. Through this categorization, I will consider the evolution ofchivalry by dissecting this amalgamation of cycles, traditions and materials that constitute White’s works. The endurance of Arthurian materialis due in part to the ability to lend itself to ideological repurposings. The Once and Future King, for example, signifies more than a recapitulationof a medieval tradition—it is immediately relevant to the 20th and 21st century. The Sword in the Stone demonstrates White’s socio-politicalcritique of modern modes of government (Communism, Fascism, monarchy, etc). By understanding reuses of medieval narrative by acontemporary author whose education emphasized medieval literature, it is possible, I suggest, for modern readers to better understand howthe broader and more varied Arthurian tradition has been received and reworked.*******