Еще менее века тому назад филологи располагали весьма скудными сведениями о Томасе Мэлори

Conclusion
In the course of the analysis of the novel by Thomas Malory "The Death of Arthur", we came to the following conclusions and provisions regarding the goal and objectives of this work:
The true sound of the novel by Thomas Malory and the place it occupies in English literature can only be clarified by studying a number of circumstances: the tradition of courtly literature, the peculiarities of the literary process in England in the 15th century, the cultural situation of this period. Malory's position as a writer presupposes a conscious selection of material for his work and the same conscious interpretation of it, which finds the most striking manifestation in the artistic system of images of the novel he created.
Malory's novel is connected with other phenomena of English culture of the 15th century - a very complex and contradictory time in the development of artistic thought in England; the time when new trends arose and openly declared themselves in the work of individual writers of this time; when these new trends existed side by side with traditional artistic principles, but, penetrating equally traditional forms, modified and complicated them. Thomas Malory's novel Le Morte d'Arthur is created in an environment where the old and the new, the traditional and the innovative collide; it bears the imprint of a turbulent and controversial era.
Malory's novel crowns the cycle of English novels about King Arthur and the Knights of the Round Table. As you know, Malory's book is based on numerous plots of chivalric novels. These are the French novels "Merlin" (from the cycle of pseudo-Borron), "The Search for the Holy Grail", "The Romance of Lancelot" and "The Death of Arthur" (from the prose cycle of the Vulgate), the prose novel "Tristan", partly "Knight of the Cart" by Chrétien de Troyes and the English alliterated novel Le Morte d'Arthur. The most important folklore and mythological source of individual storylines and the central images of the novel (Arthur, Lancelot, Gawain, Guinevere) associated with them are Celtic epic tales. However, the Irish sagas are not a source, but a parallel, to a certain extent even a model for the legends of King Arthur. And therefore it is not possible to build straight genetic series.
Over the four centuries of its development, the genre of chivalric romance has developed an entire aesthetic system, or canon, closely associated with literary etiquette, with ritual, stable and characteristic elements of the so-called. courtly system of relations. The system of images of the novel "The Death of Arthur" perfectly embodies the author's idea of the death of an integral social order, of the dying of the courtly tradition, when the moral foundations developed by the three-hundred-year-old (for England) knightly culture
collapsed before Malory's eyes. He strives to keep them, embodying in art form all the best aspects of the ethics and aesthetics of the world of chivalry. Malory comes to the conclusion that his death is inevitable.
novel , which has received the name of the chivalric epic in Russian literary criticism, and which we define in this work as a novel due to the fact that it completes the tradition of the medieval chivalric novel, turns out to be more complex than the genre of chivalric romance that existed before it, and even more complex than a simple collection of short stories. What some researchers (in particular, E. Vinaver) believe is the so-called. The "novelistic" nature of the novel is, in our opinion, its multiplot, which largely determines the system of images of the novel, which is characterized by a shift in the author's emphasis in the development of the storyline, innovation in the interpretation of the so-called. "negative characters", the desire to convey the idea of a dying courtly system of relations in the modern world of Malory due to a more subtle and complex depiction of love relationships, as well as an innovative interpretation of the idea of chivalry.
In modern English literature, Malory did not have a ready-made form for the realization of his artistic intention, and he himself became its creator. For Malory, the framework of one chivalric novel and the system of images of such a novel, which had already become clichéd by that time (even if it was so beloved in England as "The Death of Arthur"), turned out to be cramped. Malory needed a synthesis of a number of plots in order for the work to acquire its inherent ideological sound and artistic significance - a character that it could have only in England of the 15th century. In Malory's work, a number of inconsistencies can be noted, the so-called. the canonical system of images of a chivalric novel, namely: the central character is Lancelot, which becomes clear already by the fifth book, and not King Arthur, whose artistic image remains obscured until the final books of the novel; with the death of the protagonist, whose name, as a rule, in a chivalric romance was already reflected in the title of the work, the narrative does not end; the love line of the novel Lancelot - Guinevir violates the courtly principle of serving the vassal to the overlord, which is rooted in the Middle Ages; Malory's multi-plot narrative implies a constant expansion of the figurative range of the work, and not a concentration of attention on individual images. The innovation shown by Malory in the system of images of the novel "The Death of Arthur" is connected, in our opinion, with the author's desire to overcome the above canonical form of the system of images of the chivalric novel, and to reflect the ideas and ideals of chivalry in the contemporary historical and cultural situation in England in the 15th century.