Book contents
- Nineteenth-Century Literature in Transition: The 1860s
- Nineteenth-Century Literature in Transition
- Nineteenth-Century Literature in Transition: The 1860s
- Copyright page
- Contents
- Figures
- Contributors
- Introduction
- Chapter 1 Realism and Psychology
- Chapter 2 Sensational Bodies
- Chapter 3 Irish Rebellion on the Sensational Stage
- Chapter 4 Palgrave’s Golden Treasury
- Chapter 5 Impossible Monsters, Rabbit Holes, and New Worlds
- Chapter 6 Periodicals, Popular Fiction, and the Affordances of Digital Collections
- Chapter 7 Publishing in the 1860s
- Chapter 8 Italy in Transition
- Chapter 9 Silent Center, Vocal Margins
- Chapter 10 Empire and Evidence in Armadale and the Morant Bay Rebellion
- Chapter 11 Reading the Nonevental
- Chapter 12 An Age of Mythmaking
- Chapter 13 Reimagining Society
- Chapter 14 Historical Ecologies in Heterodox Economic Thought and Literary Realism of the 1860s
- Chapter 15 Extraction, Exhaustion, and the Sensation Novel of the 1860s
- Chapter 16 Evolution and the Human
- Bibliography
- Index
Chapter 12 - An Age of Mythmaking
Nation and Race in Poetry
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 01 February 2024
- Nineteenth-Century Literature in Transition: The 1860s
- Nineteenth-Century Literature in Transition
- Nineteenth-Century Literature in Transition: The 1860s
- Copyright page
- Contents
- Figures
- Contributors
- Introduction
- Chapter 1 Realism and Psychology
- Chapter 2 Sensational Bodies
- Chapter 3 Irish Rebellion on the Sensational Stage
- Chapter 4 Palgrave’s Golden Treasury
- Chapter 5 Impossible Monsters, Rabbit Holes, and New Worlds
- Chapter 6 Periodicals, Popular Fiction, and the Affordances of Digital Collections
- Chapter 7 Publishing in the 1860s
- Chapter 8 Italy in Transition
- Chapter 9 Silent Center, Vocal Margins
- Chapter 10 Empire and Evidence in Armadale and the Morant Bay Rebellion
- Chapter 11 Reading the Nonevental
- Chapter 12 An Age of Mythmaking
- Chapter 13 Reimagining Society
- Chapter 14 Historical Ecologies in Heterodox Economic Thought and Literary Realism of the 1860s
- Chapter 15 Extraction, Exhaustion, and the Sensation Novel of the 1860s
- Chapter 16 Evolution and the Human
- Bibliography
- Index
Summary
The 1860s marked a change of attitude toward myth. Formerly dismissed as falsehood, it now became a way to meditate on origins and identity at a time when orthodox religious belief was coming into question and Britons began to think of their colonies as an Empire. Inspired by the linguist Max Müller’s [GK17]theories of Aryan heritage, and his own dislike of John Henry Newman’s Romanism, Charles Kingsley claimed that the British people’s race and culture were Teutonic. Similar ideas about the British character were allegorized in poetry. Focusing on poetic reenvisionings of classical, medieval, and Arthurian stories by Tennyson, Thomas Westwood, and William Morris, this chapter explores how these poems reflected, but also helped to create, a myth of Britishness.
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- Nineteenth-Century Literature in Transition: The 1860s , pp. 219 - 237Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2024