Style and the Development of Malory’s Morte Darthur

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.