| dc.description.abstract | This thesis examines Mary Stewart’s Arthurian novels; The Crystal Cave (1970), The Hollow Hills (1973), The Last Enchantment (1979), The Wicked Day (1983), and The Prince and the Pilgrim (1995). These five novels are compared with Stewart’s thrillers, written before the publication of her first Arthurian novel, and three other modern Arthurian novels. The comparative Arthurian works are T. H. White’s The Sword in the Stone (1958), Marion Zimmer Bradley’s The Mists of Avalon (1982) and Rosemary Sutcliff’s Sword at Sunset (1963). These texts have been selected to facilitate an original study of Stewart’s treatment of three major themes in her Arthurian fiction: (i) natural history and the philosophy of royal education, (ii) religion and gender, and (iii) post-Roman Britain and archaeology. In doing so, the thesis casts a new light on Stewart’s Arthurian novels where each chapter brings to the thesis germane cross-disciplinary readings drawing from British history, educational theories, theology, gender studies and archaeology.
To develop this argument, four chapters are devoted to the analysis of the suggested texts and themes. Chapter One shows how Stewart’s Arthurian fiction shares many underlying structural features and themes with her thrillers, regardless of genre differences, and reads them in dialogue with one another as a coherent oeuvre. Chapter Two discusses White’s and Stewart’s different views on royal education while paying attention to the educational theory of Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s Emile (1762). Chapter Three examines the complex interplay between religion and gender in Stewart’s Arthurian novels and Bradley’s The Mists of Avalon besides second-wave feminism and the changing religious atmosphere in both Britain and America. Chapter Four compares Stewart’s Arthurian novels with Sutcliff’s Sword at Sunset alongside archaeological texts and discoveries from the mid to late twentieth century and analyses the extent to which they are informed by recent archaeological thought. Together, the chapters bridge the gap in previous scholarship by providing the first full study of Stewart’s Arthurian novels from three main perspectives integral to the modern Arthurian canon. | en_GB |
