Romantic Women Writers and Arthurian Legend

1. Front Matter

   Pages i-xi

   PDF

2. Introduction

   • Katie Garner

   Pages 1-18

3. Arthuriana for the ‘Fair Sex’: Gender Politics and the Reception of Romance

   • Katie Garner

   Pages 19-68

4. Haunting Beginnings: Women’s Gothic Verse and King Arthur

   • Katie Garner

   Pages 69-114

5. Next Steps: Recovering the Arthurian Past in Women’s Travel and Topographical Writing

   • Katie Garner

   Pages 115-162

6. The Rise of the Female Arthurianist: Satire and Scholarship

   • Katie Garner

   Pages 163-215

7. A Fashionable Fantasy: Arthur in the Annuals

   • Katie Garner

   Pages 217-259

8. Afterword

   • Katie Garner

   Pages 261-266

9. Back Matter

   Pages 267-311

   PDF

This book reveals the breadth and depth of women’s engagements with Arthurian romance in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Tracing the variety of women’s responses to the medieval revival through Gothic literature, travel writing, scholarship, and decorative gift books, it argues that differences in the kinds of Arthurian materials read by and prepared for women produced a distinct female tradition in Arthurian writing. Examining the Arthurian interests of the best-selling female poets of the day, Felicia Hemans and Letitia Elizabeth Landon, and uncovering those of many of their contemporaries, the Arthurian myth in the Romantic period is a vibrant location for debates about the function of romance, the role of the imagination, and women’s place in literary history. 

• Arthurian legend
• women writers
• Romantic writing
• nineteenth century literature
• Tennyson
• British and Irish Literature

“Katie Garner’s Romantic Women Writers and Arthurian Legend is to experience a shift in scale. Garner’s work is on a niche topic, and the question arises as to how broad a readership it can attract. … scholars interested in Romantic medievalism or Romantic Arthurianism more specifically may want to follow up some of the paths Garner opens, and they will undoubtedly find this monograph a useful source book.” (Geraldine S. Friedman, European Romantic Review, Vol. 30 (4), 2019)

“Romantic Women Writers and Arthurian Legend wears its intellectual rigour with elegance and manages to be fluent and readable while demon­strably being the product of erudite and incisive research. … Garner’s book will be of enormous benefit to scholars of nineteenth-century Arthurania and medievalism, as well as to scholars researching nineteenth-century women’s reading practices and negotiations with the literary marketplace more generally.” (Clare Broome Saunders, Tulsa Studies in Women’s Literature, Vol. 38 (1), 2019)

“Engagingly written and painstakingly researched, this book provides an insightful and multifaceted view of Romantic women writers’ relationship with Arthurian legend.” (Lisa Plummer Crafton, Medievally Speaking, medievallyspeaking.blogspot.com, August, 2018) “Meticulously researched and elegantly organized, Katie Garner’s Romantic Women Writers and Arthurian Legend is the most extensive study to date of what British women writers of the Romantic era knew about Arthurian stories, showing how they imaginatively adapted these often insubstantial and fragmentary sources into works expressive of their own concerns and desires.   Scholars of nineteenth-century poetry, especially of Tennyson, will find Garner’s exploration of the themes and language of women’s writing enlightening.  I would recommend this book to anyone interested in the development of nineteenth-century medievalism.” (Clare A. Simmons, Professor and Director of Undergraduate Studies, Ohio State University, USA)

• University of St Andrews, St Andrews, United Kingdom

  Katie Garner

Katie Garner is a Lecturer in Nineteenth-Century Literature at the University of St Andrews, UK.

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