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3 results

  • Chapter 12 - An Age of Mythmaking

  • Edited by Pamela K. Gilbert, University of Florida
  • Book:
    Nineteenth-Century Literature in Transition: The 1860s
    Published online:
    01 February 2024
    Print publication:
    08 February 2024, pp 219-237

  • 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.