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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.
List 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.
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.
Summary
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.
Additional text
“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)
Report
"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)
