Celtic Myth in Contemporary Children's Fantasy: Idealization, Identity, Ideology

by Dimitra Fimi

Overview

Runner-up of the Katherine Briggs Folklore Award 2017

Winner of the Mythopoeic Scholarship Award for Myth&Fantasy Studies 2019

This book examines the creative uses of “Celtic” myth in contemporary fantasy written for children or young adults from the 1960s to the 2000s. Its scope ranges from classic children’s fantasies such as Lloyd Alexander’s The Chronicles of Prydain and Alan Garner’s The Owl Service, to some of the most recent, award-winning fantasy authors of the last decade, such as Kate Thompson (The New Policeman) and Catherine Fisher (Darkhenge). The book focuses on the ways these fantasy works have appropriated and adapted Irish and Welsh medieval literature in order to highlight different perceptions of “Celticity.” The term “Celtic” itself is interrogated in light of recent debates in Celtic studies, in order to explore a fictional representation of a national past that is often romanticized and political.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781137552822
Publisher:	Palgrave Macmillan
Publication date:	03/06/2017
Series:	Critical Approaches to Children's Literature
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	305
File size:	6 MB

About the Author

Dimitra Fimi is Senior Lecturer in English at Cardiff Metropolitan University, Wales, UK. Her monograph Tolkien, Race and Cultural History won the Mythopoeic Scholarship Award for Inklings Studies. She is co-editor A Secret Vice: Tolkien on Invented Languages. She lectures on fantasy, children’s literature, and medievalism.

Table of Contents

1.Introduction.- Part I. Irish Myth.- 2. Otherworldly Ireland.- 3. Celticity and the Irish Diaspora.- Part II. Welsh Myth.- 4. Lloyd Alexander’s 'The Chronicles of Prydain'.- 5. Welsh Heritage for Teenagers.- 6. Susan Cooper and the Arthur of the Welsh.- 7. Conclusion.- Bibliography.- Index.

What People are Saying About This

From the Publisher

“Like the characters with whom it deals, this book walks between worlds, in this case those of medieval Irish and Welsh literature, of modern romantic Celticists, and of fiction produced for young adults. It does so with a remarkable knowledge of each, producing a host of new insights.” (Ronald Hutton, Professor of History, University of Bristol, UK)

Editorial Reviews

It is a welcome study because it brings together a significant number of twentieth-century books for older children and adolescents so that patterns of usage of the pre-modern Celtic-language source texts become clear. … Celtic Myth in Contemporary Children’s Fantasy is a well-researched and informative analysis, highly readable … and a solid contribution to the study of the uses and misuses of myth in fantasy.” (Jessica Hemming, Folklore, Vol. 130 (4), 2019)

From the Publisher