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You've probably heard that chivalry is dead... [Gravestone with chivalry written on it

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Oh yeah it was totally on the news just yesterday, you know it's gotten

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increasingly rare for men to pick up the bill, or to open doors, or lay down their [Couple in a restaurant asking for a separate bill]

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jackets over puddles yeah... Which might be good news for jackets but there's [Couple jumping over a puddle]

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another arena in which chivalry's facing extinction. Fiction, yep chivalry in

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fiction was doing okay as recently as the Victorian era. Although the

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protagonists in books like Pride and Prejudice and Jane Eyre were women [The two books side by side]

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rather than men, these books still featured morally upright good-hearted

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protagonists who became even more morally upright and good-hearted. With the

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rise of modernism though this moralistic do-goodery went out of fashion.

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Well the modernists were interested in experimenting with form and content,

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making self conscious breaks from the traditional ways of writing. Which meant

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among other things, ditching the traditional chivalric hero in favor of [Man on motorbike covers a knight in dust]

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morally ambiguous antiheroes. Well suddenly finding a chivalric knight in a novel

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became just about as likely as finding a chivalric knight in public. Assuming [A knight in a busy city]

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you're not spending the evening at medieval times.

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Anyway the trend continued into the early 21st century to the point that

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cable television became a sort of holding pen for anti heroes. From

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Breaking Bad's Walter White, a not-so-great man who over the course of [Man with a moustache on a TV]

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the series becomes a much much worse man. Mad Men's Don Draper a troubled man with

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a troubled past which over the course of the series finally arrives at the point

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in his life where... he can make a pretty good coca-cola commercial. Well not

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exactly King Arthur. However, all's not lost for chivalry in fiction, it still [Picture of King Arthur with a big red cross over it]

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manages to survive in children's literature which is all about Noble

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central protagonist teaching moral lessons, and occasionally the ABCs. We see [Knight pops out of a kids textbook]

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examples of chivalry in such children's books as the Harry Potter series,

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although the magic and the adventures are definitely front and center, Harry's

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nobility and morality are a really important aspect of the series. We're not

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sure that Harry Potter as Don Draper would have sold quite as many copies but, we can dream... [Harry Potter doing a coca-cola commercial]

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