It is characteristic of the authors of Meraugis, Fergus and Durmart that their works continually make deliberate references to Chrétien's Arthurian romances; thus it is equally true for thirteenth-century readers and for modern commentators that the three later texts cannot be properly understood unless seen against the background of the Arthurian romances that preceded them. The authors presuppose that their public is familiar with even the details of Chrétien's works; it is only on this premiss that they can be fully effective in the presentation of their own attitudes, their carefully considered insertions of motifs and scenes, their playful handling of familiar matiere and also their criticism of the earlier author, both implicit and explicit. Persistent allusions to the pattern of expectations predetermined by Chrétien's works create a specific kind of generic development going beyond mere similarities of form and content.

All three romances bear witness to a renewed flowering of Arthurian verse romances in the period up to about 1250, a trend more conspicuous in terms of the quality rather than the quantity of the output. Some decades after Chrétien's death a series of gifted authors undertook the attempt to put new impetus into the genre of Arthurian romance in verse, which in the meantime had either confined itself to shorter lays and episodic continuations of an older work, or had abdicated its dominant position in favour of romances in prose.