...Chapter 1 introduces the main themes of book, the scholarly contexts within which the research is situated, and the methods by which the research for the book was conducted. It begins by giving a brief overview of existing approaches to the study of the English folk arts (e.g. socio-historical...

...This chapter focuses on the creative outputs of the contemporary English folk resurgence, looking at folk artists’ growing engagements with the cultural mainstream and examining the wide variety of ways in which English folk music and dance is thus being represented, redeveloped and reinvented...

...Acting as a foil to the previous chapter’s emphasis on multiplicity within the English folk scene, Chapter 4 explores the potential for identifying developing stylistic tendencies across the work of high-profile English folk artists. It begins by considering discourse gathered during fieldwork...

...This chapter focuses on English identity and its politics, analysing the versions of Englishness that can be found within the work of contemporary English folk artists, and their explicit and implicit political implications. It codifies a range of English identities under construction...

... language and imagery create a narrative frame that contextualizes an encounter between peasants and a traveller focused around a discussion of death. This chapter argues that the Gothic is juxtaposed with folk belief in these works, to underscore that both the peasants’ dvoeverie...

... reading’. Furthermore, it offers an analysis of the television series, Queer as Folk, which argues that if this drama can be considered ‘progressive’, this is not simply a matter of its use of a postmodern or camp aesthetic but of an interplay between formal devices associated...

... collection Dubliners (1914), the folk song ‘The Lass of Aughrim’ (1819/1844) and the novel Beautiful World, Where Are You (2020) by Sally Rooney. The chapter looks at the link between song and individual and cultural memory, examining how the role of grief shifts from the ballad into Joyce’s modernist short...

...Performing Englishness looks in detail at the growth in popularity and profile of the English folk arts in the first decade of the twenty-first century. Based on original research within English folk culture, it is the only ethnographic study of its kind. By closely scrutinising various facets...

... consequences of this crisis for the sense of Irish identity and the place of religion in Irish life. The process of secularization and the demise of folk religion were already under way, but the abuse crisis both hastened the change and demolished beliefs of clergy and many lay people regarding the nature...

...This chapter examines counterfeit beggars, bigamists and bogus cunning folk in early modern England. It argues that descriptions of false beggars and vagabonds from the late Middle Ages indicate a change in perception of the phenomenon and (re-)introduced motifs which can be found...

... not only to the persistence of folk tradition but also to a conscious attempt by the Cambridge Platonists Henry More and Joseph Glanville to restore a ‘consensus which was eroding – in divine retribution, in immortal soul, in providence of history, in vision as access to truth’. The defence of ghostly...

... Service Communitarianism Work and masculinity Environmentalist community Nationalist work camps Rolf Gardiner camps Nazi support in Britain Zionist movement Woodcraft Folk camps Grith Fyrd camps British kibbutz settlers David Eder farm Women and unemployment An extraordinary variety...

..., however, this chapter emphasizes the continued value of noticing and appreciating the powerful and resilient nature of folk culture, wherever it resides. Britishness collective memory football match police strikers Girton identity formation jokes lark memory play police police football match...

... of Medicine & Homeopathy Sowa Rigpa Tibet yoga Ardener Edwin definitions governance knowledge ontology superstition classification subaltern therapeutics traditional medicine India British rule imperial history of medicine historiography folk medicine Indian religion My analysis...

...This chapter details the progression of an observational film still in process. It tells the story of a unique family of musicians, who battle various odds to create a successful family life. The mother, Debby is banjo and violin player, and runs a folk group. Her husband Zohar is a brilliant...

... of Frenchness through its emphasis on text and the self-expression of the lone ‘auteur’. Focusing on evolving constructions and uses of chanson, the discussion describes how it plays its part in the nineteenth-century emphasis on a mythical rural past embodied in folk songs and is commercialised through...

...The on-going adherence of the Afro-Surinamese and of new British Indian and Javanese migrants to their own folk beliefs and practices necessitated a response from Dutch colonial medicine. If modern leprosy politics were to succeed, some degree of cooperation and compliance from the population...

...The first of the three chapters that make up Part I (Contemporary English Folk), this chapter explores the specific relationships between the current resurgence of the English folk arts and matters of professionalisation and commercialisation. It begins by charting these relationships in the recent...

...In this chapter I argue two separate (but related) things. Firstly, focusing primarily on the cult film Blood on Satan’s Claw (Piers Haggard, 1971), I explore the generic qualities of a range of Gothic and so-called ‘folk horror’ films, and think about how far rural landscape plays...