Malory, Thomas - Dhira B. Mahoney (essay date 1980)
Dhira B. Mahoney (essay date 1980)
SOURCE: Mahoney, Dhira B. “Narrative Treatment of Name in Malory's Morte D'Arthur.” ELH 47, no. 4 (1980): 646-56.
[In the following essay, Mahoney studies Malory's treatment of names and their significance in Le Morte Darthur.]
The nature of any form of prose fiction is dictated by the author's attitude towards his readers or audience, and, as a corollary, towards his fictional material—his characters and the events which involve them. The medieval narrative tradition requires an author to treat his material in a way that is unfamiliar to readers of the novel, used as they are to either the omniscient, manipulative narrator of nineteenth-century fiction or the detached narrator of twentieth-century realism, “invisible, refined out of existence, paring his fingernails.”1 Still strongly connected to his roots in the oral tradition, the medieval author can never be invisible. As...
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