Modernist Medievalisms: The Recuperation of Chivalric Romance in Interwar British Literature
Bibliographic record
Abstract
World War I created a disillusioned social and cultural zeitgeist that was seemingly out of step with Britain’s hopeful and optimistic past. As a result, modernist scholars have tended to assume that allusions to pre-war literature in post-World War I British literature were either ironic or nostalgic. Lately, however, the influence of the “irony thesis” in modernist studies has diminished, while the definition of literary modernism has expanded to include a much wider range of forms and styles. A study examining the extensive recuperation of chivalric romance during the interwar period is therefore much needed today. This dissertation reads authors who pointedly recuperate chivalric pasts, writers such as Siegfried Sassoon, Wilfred Owen, Rebecca West, David Jones, and Dorothy L. Sayers, and makes a case for chivalric romance as a bridge between modernist works. Arguing for ethical and literary continuity despite prevalent post-war disillusionment, these writers engage in what I call modernist medievalisms, because they maintain that romance possesses an ethical core that might aid in post-war social recovery. Accepting the criticism of chivalry’s propagandistic use in sending unwitting young men into the trenches, the authors I study nevertheless sense an abiding communal meaning in chivalry’s roots. In my opening chapters, I argue that Sassoon and Jones used writers like Alfred Lord Tennyson and William Morris to build on and complicate the socially conscious Victorian medieval revival. In further chapters, I track the transformation of chivalry in works by Owen, West, and Sayers that reprioritize chivalric virtues, making chivalry, and the definitions of the knightly hero and the quest, more feminine, egalitarian, and collective. These authors envision a new chivalry for a post-war world, one that emphasizes affective ethical intuition in familial and communal relations.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.003 | 0.005 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.013 | 0.028 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.010 | 0.004 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.004 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.003 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".