Katie Garner
Katie Garner is Lecturer in Nineteenth-Century Literature at the University of St Andrews. She is the author of Romantic Women Writers and Arthurian Legend: The Quest for Knowledge (Palgrave, 2017), and the co-editor (with Nicholas Roe) of John Keats and Romantic Scotland (Oxford University Press, 2022). She has published various articles and chapters on aspects of nineteenth-century Arthuriana.
Article: When King Arthur Met the Venus
The first edition of Bannerman’s Tales of Superstition and Chivalry (1802) contained an erotic engraving of a naked Venus figure, which was declared ‘offensive to decency’ by Scottish audiences in the poet’s native Edinburgh. Garner’s account investigates the controversy surrounding the engraving and the puzzling disparity between it and the ballad it illustrated: the Arthurian-themed ‘Prophecy of Merlin’. Using evidence from Bannerman’s correspondence with noted Scottish male publishers and antiquarians, this essay argues that decision to include the dangerous engraving was symptomatic of current anxieties surrounding a female-authored text which threatened to encroach on antiquarian and Arthurian enquiry. Continue reading
Post: Conference Report for 11th Eighteenth-Century Literature Research Network in Ireland (ECLRNI) Symposium
by Katie Garner On Saturday 7 December, members of the Eighteenth-Century Literature Research Network in Ireland gathered at St Patrick’s College in Drumcondra, just north of Dublin city centre, for the network’s 11th annual symposium. … Continue reading
