The Quest in "A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court" by M.Twain and "Small World" by D.Lodge

The Arthurian Legends are broadly used as favorable source for creation of literary works. The cycle of Arthurian Legends is a concept linked with a legend of King Arthur, the knights of the Round Table, Queen Guinevere, Sir Lancelot (Launcelot), Sir Perceval (Percival), Excalibur, Arthur’s sword (Taylor, Online). The legend of King Arthur consists of medieval legends and fairy tales of various authors and partly of historic facts originated around 6th century AD in Britain and territory of present day Europe. H. and I. Daemmrich in The Themes and Motifs in Western Literature (1987) define the source of the legend more precisely stating that the appearance of the quest for the Holy Grail and the adventures of Sir Lancelot and the other knights’ of the Round Table date back to Thomas Malory’s work Morte D’Arthur (1485). Such notions as courageous knights, heroic deeds, elegant court ladies, honor and romances should be considered in order to catch the general meaning of the Arthurian Legends. One aspect of the Arthurian Legends is the quest of the Holy Grail that is the highest aim of pilgrimages of King Arthur’s knights. J. Garry remarks that ‘The Arthurian cycle […] sets the pattern for medieval romances about “knights errant”’ (Garry, 2005:13). Comparing several dictionary entries on romance, one could generalize that romance refers to a heroic prose characteristic in aristocratic literature of Medieval Europe that narrates fantastic stories about fabulous adventures of a heroic knight, who goes on a quest. N. Frye explains that ‘The romance is the nearest of all literary forms to the wish – fulfillment dream, and for that reason it has socially a curiously paradoxical role. In every age the ruling social or intellectual class tends to project its ideals in some form of romance, where the virtuous heroes and beautiful heroines represent the ideals and the villains the threats to their ascendancy.
This is the general character of chivalric romance in the Middle Ages, aristocratic romance in the Renaissance, bourgeois romance since the eighteenth century, and revolutionary romance in contemporary Russia’ (Frye, 1973:186). Following the historical development of romance, N. Frye adds that, ‘Romance revived in the period we call Romantic as part of the Romantic tendency to archaic feudalism and a cult of the hero, or idealized libido. In England the romances of W. Scott and, in less degree, the Brontes, are part of a mysterious Northumbrian renaissance, a Romantic reaction against the new industrialism in the Midlands, which also produced the poetry of W. Wordsworth and R. Burns and the philosophy of T. Carlyle’ (Frye, 1973: 306). …