Amy Louise Blaney

Amy Louise Blaney

Twitter: @blaney_louise
Instagram: @blaney_louiseig
Email: a.l.blaney@keele.ac.uk
Website: https://www.keele.ac.uk/humanities/ourpeople/amyblaney/
ResearchGate: https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Amy_Blaney

Thesis Title

The Arthurian Legend in British Literature, 1660-1820

Institution

Keele University

Supervisors

Professor Nicholas Seager (Keele)
Professor David Amigoni (Keele)
Professor David Matthews (Manchester)

Research Summary

My doctoral thesis examines literary engagements with Arthurian legend across the long eighteenth-century, considering the ways in which reworkings of Arthur intervene in debates about historiography, gender, class, and national identity.

My research explores the nationalisation of cultural mythologies and examines the intersections between gendered and national identities. In particular, my work considers how Williamite and Georgian appropriations of King Arthur enabled the Victorians to rework the myth, but were also distinctive from those later reworkings, responding to cultural concerns from the Glorious Revolution to the Napoleonic Wars.

Research Interests

My wider research interests include Arthurian literature, folklore and mythology, eighteenth and nineteenth-century medievalism, gender theory, cultural memory literary explorations of ageing, and the intersections between literature and history.

My research interests include Arthurian literature, eighteenth and nineteenth century medievalism, gender theory, and the intersections between literature and history.

Publications

“An ideal personage […] of poetic credibility”: Richard Hole’s The Northern Enchantment and the revival of Arthurian Romance in the late-eighteenth century, British Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies 52nd Annual Conference, 05 January 2023, St Hugh’s College, Oxford University

“‘Such strange puppets’: Queen Caroline, Merlin’s Cave and Symbolic Arthurianism in the Age of Reason”, International Arthurian Society British Branch Conference 2022, 02 September 2022, University of Lincoln

“Reflections on Postgraduate Teaching in Higher Education”, English Shared Futures 2022, 07 July 2022, Manchester Metropolitan University

“From Indifference to Engagement: Arthurian Romance, National Identity, and ‘a world of fine fabling’ in the Age of Reason”, British Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies 51st Annual Conference, 05 January 2022, St Hugh’s College, Oxford University [online]

“‘Such marvellous fictions’: Antiquarians, Arthur, and the Re-Imagining of the English Past in the Mid-Eighteenth Century”, British Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies 50th Annual Conference, 06 January 2021, St Hugh’s College, Oxford University [online]

“Myth-Making and National Identity: Re-Reading Arthur in the Aftermath of the Glorious Revolution”, Bangor English 16th Annual Medievalism Transformed Conference, 19 September 2020, The Centre for Arthurian Studies, Bangor University [online]

“King Arthur vs The Devil: Allegory, Myth-Making and National Identity in Richard Blackmore’s Prince Arthur”, British Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies 49th Annual Conference, 08 January 2020, St Hugh’s College, Oxford University

“Literary Coteries and the Revival of Arthurian Romance amongst Eighteenth-Century Antiquarians”, International Society of Eighteenth-Century Studies 15th International Congress on the Enlightenment, 16 July 2019, University of Edinburgh

“Manly Sensibility: King Arthur, Antiquarianism and Masculinity in Eighteenth-Century England”, Keele Humanities and Social Sciences Postgraduate Symposium, 12 June 2019, Keele University

“The Formation of the English Gentleman: Masculinity in the Eighteenth-Century Arthurian Narrative”, Disrupting Disciplines, Sharing Perspectives Postgraduate Conference, 29 April 2019, Keele University

Student profiles

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