MYTH, MAGIC, FANTASY, AND FAERY 

The Origins of the Insular Imaginary

This course is an exploration of the mythic origins of British and Irish identity and literature, which explores the languages and mythologies of the various peoples of the British Isles, and the development of the fantastic, imaginary, magical, and weird in literature and popular narrative, through the Medieval Period, to the Romantic and Gothic revival of Medieval sensibilities, the birth of genre literatures of the Imagination in the Nineteenth Century, the use of Myth in Modernist literature, and Twentieth Century literature of the fantastic, the weird, the wonderful, and the horrific. The resurgence of Fantasy as a genre in the Twenty-First Century, and modern approaches to Myth will form the conclusion of the course.