Por Trás da Capa e da Espada: o neomedievalismo em “Príncipe Valente” (1939 – 1940), de Hal Foster.

Abstract

The Middle Ages are high in the current pop universe. The medieval theme is present in every imaginable form, style and color in film, literature, TV series, electronic and board games, Heavy Metal, or cultural fairs and events. In this second decade of the twenty-first century, researchers of the Studies in Medievalism - the Anglo-American scholarship devoted to the study of the uses and appropriations of the medieval past - proposed to (re) formulate a theoretical concept capable of covering and explaining the nuances of these new interfaces of the Middle Ages with entertainment culture - the so-called neomedievalism. Based on this reference, we study the comic series "Prince Valiant - In the Days of King Arthur", created by the Canadian illustrator Harold Foster in 1937. The proposal consists of analyzing how the Middle Ages is represented in the transition context of the 1930s by 1940, when the United States had not yet recovered from the economic and psychological damage caused by the Great Depression, and totalitarian regimes were striding forward over the old continent. In addition to the artistic and literary influences of Romanticism, commercial illustration and children's literature, we highlight that the adventures of Prince Valiant, set in a fantastic version of the fifth century, are replete with references to the culture and the American national imaginary, so as the myth of frontier and the self-made man. Already between the years of 1939 and 1940, the series takes a new direction, becoming even more engaged with the events of it's time. In this one-year period, Foster chronicles the "Hunen Wars", an arc of history that can be read as a critique of the German national-socialist regime. We seek here to explore the creative strategies and sets of historical-cultural references used by the author to engender such discourse, thus exploring the relations between the production of a historical fiction for profit and the insertion of ideological elements in such process.