Style and the Development of Malory’s Morte Darthur
From Manuscript to Print
By (author) Matthew Collins
Hardback (Forthcoming)
(February 2027)
ISBN: 9781804130858
6.14 x 9.21 inches
Price: $120.00
PDF (No longer our product)
(February 2027)
ISBN: 9781804130872
Price: $120.00
This book provides a stylistic analysis of Thomas Malory’s Morte Darthur using innovative tools and a unique combination of current linguistic methods to understand how texts were constructed, transmitted, classified, and read at a watershed moment when the linguistic and literary context of England was changing.
This book offers a stylistic analysis of Sir Thomas Malory’s Arthuriad, Morte Darthur, combining for the first time linguistic methods and tools to provide new readings of this canonical text. Having subjected the text to digital analysis, the author uses parallel comparison of Morte Darthur’s two earliest versions—one manuscript, one print—as a basis to explore the ways in which texts and styles develop. Such a comparison affords a unique opportunity to understand literary composition and reception at a watershed historical moment by uncovering how the text was constructed, transmitted, classified, and read. This consideration allows us to better understand the manuscript-to-print shift, the changing political landscape precipitated by the end of the Wars of the Roses, and the important literary transition from romance to the novel.
This ground-breaking volume is the product of over ten years of study, drawing on the author’s work on information structuring to develop the first complete parallel digital analysis of Morte Darthur. Innovations in corpus linguistics, poetics, narratology, and stylometrics are also applied to present a comprehensive analysis of Malory’s masterpiece. Of interest to a broad academic audience including stylistics, medieval studies, literary studies and digital humanities, the book investigates key current themes in the field—language, source style, and textual unity—in ways that will engage both students getting to grips with Malory and also suggest new methods and perspectives for those familiar with the text.
Matthew Collins is a stylistician who uses corpus, cognitive, and narratological methodologies to explore literary texts. Currently a Research Fellow at the Royal Shakespeare Company, Matthew has held research fellowships at Warwick University and the University of Birmingham investigating texts ranging from the medieval to the modern. His work on new digital methods of analysis of Malory’s Morte Darthur was awarded the Palgrave Prize in 2018.
- By (author) Matthew Collins
Similar Books
Balthasar Caymox of Nuremberg
Early Modern German Print Publishers: Popular Prints of the Seventeenth Century
Beyond Sovereign Courts
Agents and Practices in Early Modern Spanish and Habsburg Diplomacy
Volume 3
Cahiers de lexicologie
Particules floues — Nouvelles études sur le français et l'espagnol
Volume 128
Circulation, Use, Impact
The Consumption of Architectural Books in the Early Modern Eastern Adriatic
Volume 1
Councils, Conflicts, Correspondence
Urban Diplomacy in Reval (Tallinn) and Lübeck (c. 1470–1570)
Volume 67
Des mots aux actes
Traduction épistémique et littéraire. Nouvelles tendances en histoire et didactique
Volume 15
Deutsch als Fremdsprache nach Englisch an chinesischen Hochschulen
Eine empirische Forschung über Lernstrategien zum Wortschatzlernen
Homo-Politicus in the Balkans
Early Modern Southeast European History in Imperial and Regional Context
Innovationes Lovanienses: Arts, Law and Theology at the University of Louvain (1425–1797)
Studium Lovaniense: Learning across Borders, 2
Volume 18
Legal Visuality
Exegesis, Ambiguity, and Dissimulation of the Donation of Constantine in the Early Modern Period
Naples as Laboratory / Laboratorium Neapel
Style Options, Artistic Rivalry and Self Fashioning in Neapolitan Baroque Painting / Plurale Stilbildung, Kunstlerkonkurrenz und Self Fashioning in der neapolitanischen Barockmalerei