ABSTRACT
This chapter considers the unheralded role played by marginal Celtic traditions in the formation of a canonical metropolitan literature. Walter Scott's strategic use of peripheral texts to articulate a pluralist conception of "Britishness" will be reevaluated in relation to Francis Sylvester Mahony's satiric rejection of peripheral writing as a source of "authentic" national sentiment. In "A Plea for Pilgrimages," Mahony self-consciously dramatizes the dialogue between contrasting major and minor literary conceptions of authorship, his use of Scott as a fictional character giving figurative focus to abstract issues of representation in a peripheral context. In contrast, Prout's spoof antiquarianism in "A Plea for Pilgrimages" deliberately evokes the Scottian theme of the unreliability of history writing in a marginal context. In "A Plea for Pilgrimages," Mahony first supplies a series of bogus translated precursors for his version of "The Groves of Blarney.".
