Creative responses to pre-historic monuments in early twentieth century literature:1900-1950

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This project will explore creative responses to pre-historic monuments in early twentieth century literature. Selecting five British and Irish monuments, I will take a 'ground-up' research approach which prioritises examination of the site itself. Like David Gange's study of coastal communities (Gange, 2019), this project will work outwards to record each monument's local history and construct a sense of how they were understood by local people during the early twentieth century. This project will provide insight into what Alexandra Harris describes as academia's need to gain 'an understanding of what places have looked like to different kinds of people living in them' and 'fathom the historical relationships between landscape and place' (Harris, 2018). By prioritising local history, this project will identify why these 'numinous' (Walsham, 2011) sites became a source of creative inspiration and examine how academic and artistic responses, at a defining moment of the twentieth century, impact public engagement with the sites today.By focusing on five carefully selected pre-historic and religious sites, including: Glastonbury's chalice well, Arthur's Stone in Herefordshire, St Brigid's well in County Clare, Avebury, and Long Compton's Rollright Stones, this project will prioritise regional sources including parish records and databases such as British History Online's 'Inventory of Historic Monuments' (1913). This will reveal what these monuments meant to local communities and provide a new orientation point from which to consider twentieth century literature's fascination with pre-history (Radford, 2014). Studying the local history of the monuments will allow me to assess regional differences in written creative responses through the analysis of tone and content and identify how far creative licence sees the monument distanced from objective observation and accepted academic conceptions of the site. By examining folklore manuals, archaeological reports, histories, and early twentieth century fiction, this project will consider fiction andnon-fiction writers alongside one another - drawing new and complex connections between writers including: mystics Wellesley Tudor Pole and Edith Olivier, modernist writer and philosopher John Cowper Powys, and creative archaeological thinkers Alfred Watkins and Emyr Evans. The critically underestimated and elusive responses of writers like Olivier and Powys are particularly worthy of academic attention as they moved between local communities and modernist avant-garde artistic circles. By researching figures who act as a bridge between high modernism and rural communities, this project will prompt new discussions about writers whose value to the study of ruralism and pre-history in twentieth century literature has been overlooked.Modernist literature's preoccupation with pre-history and religion (Lewis, 2010) has gained critical attention in recent years. By prioritising a study of specific monuments, however, this project will be the first to isolate the site from artistic observations and build a survey of responses providing insight to human relationships with ancient monuments. Arranging the voices of local communities alongside those of artists and academics, this project will compare the diverse meanings projected onto these elusive sites which have continuously evaded human understanding and offer a new starting point from which to understand why they appeal to twentieth century writers.