Excalibur is not a thing, something you can hold in your hand.
Excalibur is the good in you.
The power to do good, to stand up for what's right, to slay dragons, to capture bank robbers.
You always carry Excalibur in your heart.


Robert Tinnell, Kids of the Round Table (1995)

Sunday, March 25, 2012

CFP Camelot on the Small Screens

Here's the call for an alternative collection on Arthurian TV:

Call for Submissions: Camelot on the Small Screen (Edited Collection)
Publication Date: 2012-04-15
Date Submitted: 2012-03-02
Announcement ID: 192848

Call for Submissions: Camelot on the Small Screen (Edited Collection)

In the past five years, there have been three television series based on the Arthurian legends: the French Kaamelott, the BBC’s Merlin, and Starz’s Camelot. Previous decades have seen dozens of series, miniseries, made-for-television movies, and animated incarnations of the legends, from The Adventures of Sir Lancelot in the 1950s to Australia’s Arthur! and the Square Knights of the Round Table or the 2001 miniseries The Mists of Avalon. The proliferation of these productions testifies to the enduring power of the myth and its continued relevance to modern audiences. Until now, most Arthurian scholarship has focused on the medieval literary corpus, modern literary adaptations, and cinematic treatments of the tales, and relatively little attention has been paid to television portrayals of Arthur and his court. We are therefore planning an edited collection that addresses this imbalance. Essays might analyze contemporary issues and themes (gender, marginalization, or religious intolerance, for example), compare TV series to literary texts, focus on a particular character within a single series or across several series, etc. We welcome proposals from scholars in all disciplines on any aspect of Camelot on the small screen.

Articles should be around 5,000-7,000 words in length including references. Please send abstracts of no more than 500 words and a short biography to Drs. Tara Foster (tafoster@nmu.edu) and Jon Sherman (jsherman@nmu.edu) at Northern Michigan University. The deadline for abstract submission is April 15, 2012 and contributors are expected to submit full papers by September 1, 2012.