Modern Tales of Knight Errantry: John Buchan and Chivalry
Modern Tales of Knight Errantry: John Buchan and Chivalry

Summary/Abstract: The present article proposes to address the problematic of genre of John Buchan’s adventure stories which are usually classed as spy fiction, historical romances and an occasional Bildungsroman. I would argue that there is a broad generic term to encompass them all, as to a smaller or greater degree they all can be classed as romances of modern knight errantry. Deeply rooted in the Victorian cult of chivalry, chivalric elements and motifs abound in Buchan’s novels and short stories. Traditionally masked by other concerns which have attracted researchers who have tended to label the Buchan oeuvre rather narrowly as spy fiction, with some half-hearted attempts at realism and a rather unfortunate entanglement in Ruritania, plus a handful of old-fashioned historical romances, a consistent reading of all his books, I would argue, would locate them, for all their modern concerns, firmly in the tradition of Victorian chivalry which appropriated and reworked the ideas of medieval chivalry to answer contemporary needs. Buchan’s generation, as the two preceding ones, had been raised in the spirit of chivalry to which many Victorian thinkers had contributed.

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