ABSTRACT

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.

part |63 pages

Part I Prehistory and paganism

chapter 1|15 pages

Druids in Modern British Fiction

The unacceptable face of Celticism

chapter 2|11 pages

Old Deities, New Worlds

The return of the gods in fiction

chapter 4|10 pages

Dreams of Celtic Kings

Victorian prehistory and the notion of ‘Celtic'

chapter 5|14 pages

‘The Truth Against the World'

Spectrality and the mystic past in late twentieth-century Cornwall

part |68 pages

PART II Gothic, romance and landscape

chapter 6|12 pages

‘Confined to a Living Grave'

Welsh poetry, Gothic and the French Revolution

chapter 7|18 pages

Fingal in the West Country

The poems of Ossian and cultural myth-making in the South West of England, 1770–1800

chapter 8|13 pages

Geological Folklore

Robert Hunt and the industrial, aesthetic and racial composition of ‘Celtic' Cornwall

chapter 9|12 pages

Celtic Cultural Politics

Monuments and mortality in nineteenth-century Brittany

chapter 10|11 pages

Spirited Away

Highland touring, ‘Toctor Shonson' and the hauntings of Celtism

part |77 pages

Part III Memory, myth and politics

chapter 11|16 pages

Cornish Crusaders and Barbary Captives

Returns and transformations
ByJo

chapter 13|12 pages

Reconstructing West Wales

Welsh representations and cultural memories of Cornwall

chapter 14|17 pages

From Apocalyptic Paranoia to the Mythic Nation

Political extremity and myths of origin in the neo-fascist milieu

chapter 15|14 pages

Albion's Spectre

Building the new Jerusalem