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Foreshadowing
Genre
Explanation and Analysis:
The Once and Future King is at its core an Arthurian legend mixed with a 20th-century fantasy novel. White's novel is regarded as a classic by fantasy scholars. It makes the Arthurian legend fantastical and exciting, with wizards, swords, brave knights, and noble if ineffectual royal women. The Once and Future King was at the forefront of a growing genre that became the basis for fantasy tropes throughout the 20th century, leading to the "swords and sorcerers" genre that defines much of the modern fantasy genre, from films and books to video games and role-playing games like Dungeons and Dragons.
The Once and Future King is often compared to The Lord of the Rings, another fantasy saga with Arthurian influences, published by J. R. R. Tolkien around the same time as White's shorter novels. White also continued a revival of Arthurian legend in the late 19th century. The Once and Future King can also be said to come at the beginning of literary postmodernism, and particularly magical realism. This was a literary movement, flourishing especially in Spanish literature, that focused on a real world tinged with complex forms of magic.
The genre of the text also depends on its form. The Once and Future King is the story of Arthur's growth from Wart, the helpless orphan bastard, to King Arthur, noble ruler of Camelot. In this sense, it is a bildungsroman, a coming-of-age story, in which Arthur goes through many trials and learns much about himself and the world, forming a fully-grown monarch by the end of the text. The novel's genre can be considered more simply, though, as a book of tales, which together make up such a bildungsroman. White modeled his story directly off of Sir Thomas Malory's Le Mort d'Arthur, a collection of Arthurian tales, a 15th-century compendium and reworking of the Matter of Britain. As Malory's text is oriented as a collection of tales, so is White's. There is, indeed, a plot that the book follows, telling the story of Arthur's growth and tragedy. But the book is indeed episodic, meant to be a collection of tales of folklore.
