“I know what thou arte”: Race and Nation in Thomas Malory’s Le Morte Darthur

Abstract

This thesis examines the ways in which new understandings of medieval texts may be generated using postcolonial frameworks and categories, especially by elucidating notions of race and nation in medieval texts. These discourses of race and nation are fundamental to the construction of identities in medieval texts, and seek to undermine the idea of the Middle Ages as Other to modernity. These chapters offer an exploration of the construction of race and nation in Thomas Malory’s Le Morte Darthur, and seek to demonstrate the fragile, contested nature of these categories. In Chapter 1 and Chapter 2, I give a reading of Malory’s depiction of the war between King Arthur and the Roman Emperor Lucius. I argue that notions of race and a national ‘imagined community’ are integral to the fantasy of unity which Malory is wedded to. Chapter 3 closely examines the Saracen knight Palomydes as a colonial subject and an Other within the Arthurian court.