MONDAY NIGHT LECTURE SERIES | MONSTROSITIES | FALL 2026

The Wasteland: Chivalry as Devastation in Grail Romance

Medieval grail romances are haunted by the theme of the Dolorous Stroke that devastates a kingdom, recreating it a monstrous wasteland. This paper argues that the Wasteland is a diagnostic not only for chivalric violence but the elitism of romance itself. Malory's C15 Morte Darthur and its C13 sources, the Lancelot-Grail cycle, are populated exclusively by noble knights and kings. Readers encounter few laborers and even fewer city dwellers — except in the Wasteland, where they emerge as heaps of the dead and their lamenting mourners. The Wasteland thus monstrously imprints the wider social costs of chivalric self-fashioning. This paper draws on ecocritical and Marxist approaches to explore the Wasteland as a monstrous political unconscious for aristocratic power and the grail romances that simultaneously extoll and castigate it.

Monstrosities
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