As a follow-up to her Celtic Myth in Children’s Fantasy course, Dr. Dimitra Fimi will explore two texts inspired by Irish and Welsh literature respectively:
- Henry Neff’s The Tapestry series (we will focus on the first two books, The Hound of Rowan and The Second Siege)
- Catherine Fisher’s Darkhenge
It is assumed that participants will be familiar with the heroic deeds of Cuchulainn and the tale of Taliesin in Lady Guest’s translation of the Mabinogion.
Dr. Dimitra Fimi is a specialist on Tolkien and fantasy literature. Her first monograph, Tolkien, Race and Cultural History: From Fairies to Hobbits (Palgrave Macmillan, 2008), won the Mythopoeic Scholarship award in Inklings Studies and was also shortlisted for the Katharine Briggs Folklore Award. She recently co-edited (with Dr Andrew Higgins) the first critical edition on Tolkien’s essay “A Secret Vice,” in which he theorizes language invention as part of coherent worldbuilding (A Secret Vice: Tolkien on Invented Languages, HarperCollins, 2016). This edition won the Tolkien Society Award for Best Book 2017. Her latest monograph, Celtic Myth in Contemporary Children’s Fantasy: Idealization, Identity, Ideology, has just been published as part of Palgrave Macmillan’s Critical Approaches to Children’s Literature series. Based on adaptation theory, reception studies, as well as archival research and interviews with authors, the book focuses on the construction of “Celtic” identities in contemporary fantasy novels for younger readers, both in the British Isles and in their Diasporas. Dr Fimi has taught two classes at Signum University: Celtic Myth in Children’s Fantasy and Folkloric Transformations.
Suggested Reading
- Henry Neff, The Hound of Rowan
- Henry Neff, The Second Siege
- Catherine Fisher, Darkhenge
