Year: 2015
Type: book-review
Abstract: A Critical History, David Matthews proposes that, after a period of modernity during which medievalism appeared in some of the central cultural practices in the western world, much of the medievalist energy and excitement visible in canonical texts, architecture, and the arts gradually diminished from the this general domain and concentrated around the various institutionalized forms of inquiry of medievalia at the modern university.As a result, medievalism was displaced from the central cultural position it held during Britain's Victorian or America's pre-and post-Civil War periods to an increasingly marginal one.Matthews declares that this move to the margin ironically rendered medievalism almost omnipresent, albeit in smaller doses and with lesser consequence.Matthews terms this kind of medievalism "residual," remarking how medievalism now left its mark no longer with the lead genres, authors, and texts of its time as in the works of Tennyson, Scott, and Thomas Carlyle, but as mere substrates, implications, and references as in Joyce, Eliot, or Pound, or as mere tropes in twentieth-century genre fiction by Eco, Fuller, or Unsworth.Similarly, Matthews expounds, there are no English-language medievalist movies that have achieved both popularity and won sufficient cultural capital to be thought of as canonical.
Source: Arthuriana
Author: Richard Utz
Institution: Georgia Institute of Technology
Language: English
Subfield: Literature and Literary Theory
Field: Arts and Humanities
Domain: Social Sciences
Open Access status: bronze
OpenAlex ID: W2229009580