This book reveals the breadth and depth of womens engagements with Arthurian romance in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Tracing the variety of womens 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 womens place in literary history.
1. Introduction.- 2. Arthuriana for the 'Fair Sex': Gender politics and the reception of romance.- 3. Haunting Beginnings: Women's Gothic Verse and King Arthur.- 4. Next Steps: Exploring the Arthurian Past in Women's Travel and Topographical Writing.- 5. The Rise of the Female Arthurianist: Satire and Scholarship.- 6. A Fashionable Fantasy: Arthur in the Annuals.- 7. Afterword.
Romantic Women Writers and Arthurian Legend wears its intellectual rigour with elegance and manages to be fluent and readable while demon?strably being the product of erudite and incisive research. & Garners book will be of enormous benefit to scholars of nineteenth-century Arthurania and medievalism, as well as to scholars researching nineteenth-century womens reading practices and negotiations with the literary marketplace more generally. (Clare Broome Saunders, Tulsa Studies in Womens Literature, Vol. 38 (1), 2019)
Engagingly written and painstakingly researched, this book provides an insightful and multifaceted view of Romantlƒo
![Romantic Women Writers and Arthurian Legend The Quest for Knoledge [Hardcover]](/itemImage/2/4/9/1/2_913098.jpg)