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Mysticism, Myth and Celtic Identity explores how the mythical and mystical past informs national imaginations. Building on notions of invented tradition and myths of the nation, it looks at the power of narrative and fiction to shape identity, with particular reference to the British and Celtic contexts. The authors consider how aspects of the past are reinterpreted or reimagined in a variety of ways to give coherence to desired national groupings, or groups aspiring to nationhood and its 'defence'. The coverage is unusually broad in its historical sweep, dealing with work from prehistory to the contemporary, with a particular emphasis on the period from the eighteenth century to the present. The subject matter includes notions of ancient deities, Druids, Celticity, the archaeological remains of pagan religions, traditional folk tales, racial and religious myths and ethnic politics, and the different types of returns and hauntings that can recycle these ideas in culture. Innovative and interdisciplinary, the scholarship in Mysticism, Myth and Celtic Identity is mainly literary but also geographical and historical and draws on religious studies, politics and the social sciences. Thus the collection offers a stimulatingly broad number of new viewpoints on a matter of great topical relevance: national identity and the politicization of its myths.

This guide combines detailed literary history with discussion of contemporary debates about Scottishness.The book considers the rise of Scottish Studies, the development of a national literature, and issues of cultural nationalism. Beginning in the medieval period during a time of nation building, the book goes on to focus on the 'Scots revival' of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries before moving on to discuss the literary renaissance of the twentieth century. Debates concerning Celticism and Gaelic take place alongside discussion of key Scottish writers such as Robert Burns, Walter Scott, Thomas Carlyle, Hugh MacDiarmid, Alasdair Gray and Liz Lochhead. The book also considers émigré writers to Scotland; Scottish literature in relation to England, the United States and Ireland; and postcolonialism and other theories that shed fresh light on the current status and future of Scottish literature.

This book unearths the layers of the British Isles' unique folkloric tradition to discover how this body of seemingly disparate tales developed. The authors find a virtual battlefield of myths on which pagan and Judeo-Christian beliefs fought for dominance, and classical, Anglo-Saxon, Germanic, and Celtic narrative threads became tangled.

Teeming with creatures, both real and imagined, this encyclopedic study in cultural history illuminates the hidden web of connections between the Victorian fascination with fairies and their lore and the dominant preoccupations of Victorian culture at large. Carole Silver here draws on sources ranging from the anthropological, folkloric, and occult to the legal, historical, and medical. She is the first to anatomize a world peopled by strange beings who have infiltrated both the literary and visual masterpieces and the minor works of the writers and painters of that era. Examining the period of 1798 to 1923, Strange and Secret Peoples focuses not only on such popular literary figures as Charles Dickens and William Butler Yeats, but on writers as diverse as Thomas Carlyle, Arthur Conan Doyle, and Charlotte Mew; on artists as varied as mad Richard Dadd, Aubrey Beardsley, and Sir Joseph Noel Paton; and on artifacts ranging from fossil skulls to photographs and vases. Silver demonstrates how beautiful and monstrous creatures--fairies and swan maidens, goblins and dwarfs, cretins and changelings, elementals and pygmies--simultaneously peopled the Victorian imagination and inhabited nineteenth-century science and belief. Her book reveals the astonishing complexity and fertility of the Victorian consciousness: its modernity and antiquity, its desire to naturalize the supernatural, its pervasive eroticism fused with sexual anxiety, and its drive for racial and imperial dominion.

In revising A Short History of English Literature Harry Blamires has thoroughly updated his final three chapters to bring the discussion on the plays, poetry and novels of the twentieth century into the 1980s; the bibliography has also been fully revised and now provides up-to-date guidance for further study. The second edition has lost none of the original's conciseness and readability. The author guides the reader through some six centuries of English literature, beginning with Chaucer's time, when the language became recognizibly our own, and goes on to analyse the background, interconnections and major achievements of individual writers in each period. He gives the reader a sense both of the continuning literary tradition and the radical changes that, for example, the Romantic Movement brought in. The book leaves the reader informed about each writer's main output, sensitive to the special character of his gifts and aware of the writer's place in the story of English literature as a whole. A lucid and readable guide, it is invaluable both to the student of English literature and to the general reader.

The recovery and reinvention of the past were fundamental to the conception of the modern in England during the long eighteenth century. Scholars then forged connections between linear time and empirical evidence that transformed historical consciousness. Chronologers, textual critics, and antiquaries constructed the notion of a material past, which spread through the cultures of print and consumption to a broader public, offering powerful—and for that reason, contested—ways of perceiving temporality and change, the historicity of objects, and the relation between fact and imagination. But even as these innovative ideas won acceptance, they also generated rival forms of historical meaning. The regular progression of chronological time accentuated the deviance of anachronism and ephemerality, while the opposition of unique artifacts to ubiquitous commodities exoticized things that straddled this divide. Inspired by the authentic products as well as the anomalous by-products of contemporary scholarship, writers, craftsmen, and shoppers appropriated the past to create nostalgic and ironic alternatives to their own moment. Barrett Kalter explores the history of these “modern antiques,” including Dryden’s translation of Virgil, modernizations of The Canterbury Tales, Gray’s Gothic wallpaper, and Walpole’s Strawberry Hill. Though grounded in the ancient and medieval eras, these works uncannily addressed the controversies about monarchy, nationhood, commerce, and specialized knowledge that defined the present for the English eighteenth century. Bringing together literary criticism, historiography, material culture studies, and book history, Kalter argues that the proliferation of modern antiques in the period reveals modernity’s paradoxical emergence out of encounters with the past.

Across the margins offers a comparative, theoretically informed analysis of the cultural formation of the Atlantic Archipelago. In its overall conception and in specific contributions (including an introductory essay), this collection demonstrates the benefits of working across the disciplines of history, geography, literature and cultural studies, but also presents new configurations of cultural forms hitherto associated with specifically national and sub-national literatures. The essays, from both established and new scholars working in the fields of British, Irish and comparative cultural studies, addresses broad questions raised by the interface between language, gender, sexuality and ethnicity in relation to marginal identities, but also includes specific genre-based case studies on contemporary poetry, fiction, drama, popular music and art. This format recognises the importance of specific concerns which emerge from different geographical locations, but also encourages movement beyond traditional formations of national cultures. Responding to recent constitutional developments in Great Britain and Ireland, it explores their implications both for the cultural negotiations of marginality and for established critical paradigms. It is therefore of interest to undergraduates, postgraduates and academics working in the areas of comparative literature, postcolonial theory, Irish, Scottish and Welsh studies, and British political/cultural studies.