Welsh mythology and folklore in the novels of Arthur Machen, John Cowper Powys and Alan Garner

Thesis

This thesis traces a line of engagement with Welsh mythology and folklore in British fiction from the fin de siècle Celtic Revival through to the 1960s and beyond. It argues that the three writers Arthur Machen, John Cowper Powys and Alan Garner, each attuned to the importance of local place and region, turn to Wales – or in various senses back to Wales – as a country whose traditions could be used to revive or reinvent aspects of life in Britain which they considered lost or in the process of disappearing. To varying extents, all three writers negotiate a relationship with Wales and ‘Welshness’ in their fiction and within this explore questions of ancestry, personal identity and what they view as the wider spiritual crises of an increasingly rational and industrialised society. Their conceptions of Wales as an alternative imaginative space in which their individual spiritualities and philosophies could more easily take shape than in England suggests that for these writers Wales exists as a place of transformation, liminality and magic, intimately connected to its mythological past. Their collected works of fiction are unique in this way; informed by, and at times working against, modern constructions of a romantic Celtic mysticism, this thesis demonstrates how the mythology and folktales of Wales are developing influences across Machen, Powys and Garner’s work, and provide the narratives and symbols necessary for exploring questions of spirituality, inherited tradition and the immaterial in the rationalised world of late nineteenth and twentieth-century Britain.

• Type of award: DPhil
• Level of award: Doctoral
• Awarding institution: University of Oxford
• Language: English
• Keywords: Cheshire; John Cowper Powys; comparative mythology; Celtic mythology; folklore; Alan Garner; Arthur Machen; welsh mythology; The Mabinogion; Mysticism; Owen Glendower; Wales; romanticism; occultism; John Rhys; Alderley Edge; Jungian
• Subjects: Medievalism in literature; Fantasy in literature; Folklore in literature; Mythology, Welsh