Mysticism, Myth and Celtic Identity

Description

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. Cover MYSTICISM, MYTH AND CELTIC IDENTITY Title Page Copyright Page Table of Contents List of contributors Mysticism, myth and Celtic identity PART I Prehistory and paganism 1 Druids in modern British fiction: the unacceptable face of Celticism 2 Old deities, new worlds: the return of the gods in fiction 3 Uncovering the deepest layers of the British past, 1850–1914 4 Dreams of Celtic kings: Victorian prehistory and the notion of ‘Celtic’ 5 ‘The truth against the world’: spectrality and the mystic past in late twentieth-century Cornwall PART II Gothic, romance and landscape 6 ‘Confined to a living grave’: Welsh poetry, Gothic and the French Revolution 7 Fingal in the West Country: the poems of Ossian and cultural myth-making in the South West of England, 1770–1800 8 Geological folklore: Robert Hunt and the industrial, aesthetic and racial composition of ‘Celtic’ Cornwall 9 Celtic cultural politics: monuments and mortality in nineteenth-century Brittany 10 Spirited away: Highland touring, ‘Toctor Shonson’ and the hauntings of Celtism PART III Memory, myth and politics 11 Cornish crusaders and Barbary captives: returns and transformations 12 Re-enacting Scottish history in Europe 13 Reconstructing West Wales: Welsh representations and cultural memories of Cornwall 14 From apocalyptic paranoia to the mythic nation: political extremity and myths of origin in the neo-fascist milieu 15 Albion’s spectre: building the new Jerusalem Index