Helen Fulton

Narrative and media

What was this about? Orientation Who? When? What? Where? Complication Then what happened?

Companion to Arthurian literature

This Companion offers a chronological sweep of the canon of Arthurian literature from its earliest beginnings to the contemporary manifestations of Arthur found in film and electronic media. Part of the popular series, Blackwell Companions to Literature and Culture, this expansive volume enables a fundamental understanding of Arthurian literature and explores why it is still integral to contemporary culture. • Offers a comprehensive survey from the earliest to the most recent works • Features an impressive range of well-known international contributors • Examines contemporary additions to the Arthurian canon, including film and computer games • Underscores an understanding of Arthurian literature as fundamental to western literary tradition

Class and Nation: Defining the English in Late-Medieval Welsh Poetry

Relations between English and Welsh in medieval Wales are often contextualized by modern historians in terms of twentieth-century imperialism, as a struggle between two nations, at least one of which was “endowed with a sense of racial superiority.”1 When the English king Edward I conquered north Wales, the last remaining princedom in Wales, in 1282, Wales seemed to have lost all hope of retaining its status as an independent nation. Governed as a provincial outpost of the English empire, the royal lands in north Wales were manacled by chains of castles and towns populated largely by English settlers. The borough towns, most of them newly planted, held a monopoly of trade that excluded the local Welsh population on the grounds that they were “foreigners.” As R. R. Davies observed, “Nowhere was the spirit of conquest and of racial superiority so vigorously and selfishly kept alive as in the Edwardian boroughs.”2

Narrative and Media: The genres of television

Each medium develops its own ways of telling stories. These different ways of telling stories encompass the devices of the plot, the technical aspects of the medium, and the codes and conventions of types of stories. Another way of putting this, which employs terms you will have encountered in earlier chapters, is that different media allow different possibilities of diegesis (telling the story) and mimesis (performance) and the relation between the two. Whether as readers (audiences) of texts or as producers of them, we recognise these combinations and categorise them, in order to advise or predict what kind of story this is going to be. These categories of story may be identified as genres (the French word for types or kinds). On the one hand, genres can be seen as offering an important way of framing texts that assists comprehension. Genre knowledge orientates competent readers towards appropriate attitudes, assumptions and expectations about a text, which are useful in making sense of it. On the other hand, genres may be seen ideologically, as constraining interpretation, as limiting the available meanings of the text. What is a genre? Texts concerned with the study of television, such as Williams (1990), Tulloch (2000) or Creeber (2001), offer genres (or forms, as Williams calls them) of television program, such as news, drama, ‘variety’, sport, advertising, ‘cop series’, soap opera, documentary, cartoons, situation comedy, childrens television and ‘popular entertainment’. Some of these are broken down still further by Creeber (2001).

The Performance of Social Class: Domestic Violence in the Griselda Story

The story of “patient Griselda” is a story about the politics of class and domestic abuse in the context of late-medieval marriage practices. The story concerns Griselda, daughter of humble village parents, who is selected to be the wife of Walter, a great lord. Despite his sincere love for her, and despite Griselda’s devotion to him, he is determined to test her obedience, in the expectation that she will finally show her true colours and turn into a nagging shrew. The testing of Griselda is in the form of severe emotional abuse. Walter removes the two children born to Griselda and tells her they have been killed. He then sends her back to her father’s house and declares that he will take another wife. Griselda, having spent years in grief and despair, still refrains from reproaching her husband but accepts his will submissively. Finally, when the husband sees that he cannot break Griselda, that she remains obedient and faithful to him no matter what he does to her, he returns the two children, now almost grown up, and restores her to her full position as his wife. And, as Chaucer says in the Clerk’s Tale, his version of the Griselda story, they lived happily ever after:

Narrative and Media: Frontmatter

What was this about? Orientation Who? When? What? Where? Complication Then what happened?

Narrative and Media: Television: narratives and ideology

What was this about? Orientation Who? When? What? Where? Complication Then what happened?

The poetic construction of authority: Dafydd ap Gwilym and the uchelwyr

Though Dafydd ap Gwilym is often haded as a poet of love and nature, the function of his poetry is to proclaim the pre-eminence and authority of the native nobihty of fourteenth-century Wales, the uchelwyr. By placing the uchelwyr in contexts suggestive of their wealth, nobility, leadership, and aesthetic superiority, the poems in the Dafydd ap Gwilym canon construct an audience which is powerful and authoritative within Wales. In doing this, the poems continue the eulogistic tradition of Welsh court poetry stretching back ultimately to the sixth century. This poetic construction of authority does not entirely conespond, however, to another version of fourteenth-century Wales made available to us by historians and contemporary historical documents. The historical construct makes it clear that following the English conquest of Wales by Edward I in 1282, it was the English Crown, not the native Welsh nobility, which held the real authority in Wales. The discrepancies between the poetic construct and the historical construct of uchelwyr status reveal the basic conservatism of the Dafydd ap Gwilym poems and their role in maintaining traditional social hierarchies within a politically changing environment. The emergence of the uchelwyr as a powerful nobility following the loss of Welsh independence in 1282 and the disappearance of the ruting dynasties of Wales has been noted by historians such as R. A. Griffiths, Glyn Roberts, and R. R. Davies, though few studies have been done specifically on this interesting and significant social group. A n administrative class of Welsh noblemen, known by the term uchelwyr among others, had already emerged during the thirteenth century, serving the native princes, particularly the rulers of Gwynedd.