RECONFIGURING ARTHUR: THE ARTHURIAN LEGEND AS PALIMPSEST IN GUY RITCHIE’S KING ARTHUR: THE LEGEND OF THE SWORD (2017)

Resumo

The Middle Ages have been a source of interest to audiences around the world nearly since the period ended until modern times. While many themes, stories and characters have been reimagined and recreated, or, in other words, palimpsested, no other has held as much sway as King Arthur, ‘the once and future king’, around whom a constellation of equally celebrated characters aligned and remain as one of the most widely acknowledged medieval legacies in the modern world. Focusing on cinema in particular, this study aims at analysing one of the most recent film adaptations of the Arthurian legend to the big screen, King Arthur: Legend of the Sword (Dir. Guy Ritchie, 2017), to understand how films and audiences engage in the process of scraping, erasing, and re-writing Arthur in the twenty-first century.