E-textuality, e-medieval, e-Malory : the rebirth of Le morte d'Arthur on the web.

Abstract

Until recently, traditional textual criticism has been unable to account for the rich historical and literary contexts surrounding medieval textual culture, especially the culture of Sir Thomas Malory’s Morte d'Arthur. Finally, though, electronic resources provide the means for reconstructing these contexts. This study focuses on showing how the application of the postmodern theories of Derrida, Bakhtin, and Foucault allow modern scholars to understand these older textual contexts in new ways. Furthermore, this study demonstrates how the use of these theories in conjunction with a social-text editing model effectively reconstructs these same contexts. Finally, in this study I show how I am currently applying these theories and models to an online transcription of the Winchester manuscript of the Morte Darthur in order to enrich the current context available for electronic research.