Allen's study deals with Lawrence's lifelong interest in the medieval
world, especially medieval literature, and its considerable influence
on his view of himself and of the Arabs with whom he fought in an
archaic theater of war, and hence his own literary production.
The Medievalism of Lawrence of Arabia investigates the influence
Lawrence's interest in medieval life and literature had on his attitudes
toward life in general and—in content, theme, and diction—on his
masterpiece, Seven Pillars of Wisdon, in particular. M.D.
Allen begins with a brief biography of T.E. Lawrence—his early
interest in things medieval and his somewhat controversial B.A.
thesis on crusader castles. Allen then reveals the extent to which
Lawrence's ideas about honor, warfare, and chivalry in the Arab
war against the Turks were shaped by his reading in medieval writings
such as Malory's Morte D'Arthur. (Both, as he makes clear,
were warrior societies dominated by horses.) Lawrence's reading
in the nineteenth-century medievalsims is also explored, as in Tennyson's Idylls of the King, Ruskin's writing on art, where the parallel
between Ruskin's ideas on ornament and Lawrence's ideas about the
dignity of war is demonstrated.
Allen then identifies the medieval and neomedieval texts of Seven
Pillars of Wisdom and shows why and to what effect Lawrence
borrowed from chivalric, neochivalric, and pseudochivalric works,
and sometines transmogrified them, revealing Lawrence's greatest
inspiration to be an English translation of the Moallakat (which is, so to speak, the Arabic Beowulf). Allen sheds
new light on many aspects of the influence of medievalism on Lawrence's
thought and writing.
M.D. Allen is Assistant Professor of English at the University
of Wisconsin Center-Fox Valley. |
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