Alliteration Deformed: The Stylistic Estrangement of Malory's Roman War

The Roman war episode of Malory's Morte Darthur preserves much of the alliteration of its poetic source. In this prose context, the alliteration both evokes a remote English past and, through its strangeness and irregularity, emphasizes the estrangement of the present from the past, complicating the work's nationalist claims.