This collection explores folklore and folkloristics within the diverse and contested national discourses of Britain and Ireland, examining their role in shaping the islands' constituent nations from the eighteenth century to our contemporary moment of uncertainty and change.

Matthew Cheeseman is Associate Professor of Creative Writing at University of Derby. He is a Council member of The Folklore Society and a trustee of Bloc Projects. He runs a small press, Spirit Duplicator.

Carina Hart is Assistant Professor in Applied English at the University of Nottingham. She specialises in global Gothic folkloric and fairy tale literature, and has also published on Romantic poetry and on fairy tale and alchemy in contemporary fiction.

1. Introduction 2. Grimm ripples: the role of the Grimms' Deutsche Sagen in the collection and creation of national folk narratives in Northern Europe 3. Forest murmurs: wood and wild in the making of England 4. 'The Last Earl of Hallamshire': legend, landscape and identity in South Yorkshire 5. Anarchy in the UK: Haddon and the anarchist agenda in the Anglo-Irish folklore movement 6. 'Powerful and sovereign medicines ... virulent poisons also': Arthur Machen, occultism, and the Celtic Revival 7. Visions of English identity: the country dance and Shakespeare-land 8. Embodied Englishness in the inter-war morris revival 9. A Scottish Volk? Folklore, anthropology, race and nationalism in inter-war Scotland 10. Photographic surveys of calendar customs: preserving identity in times of change 11. Folklore as McGuffin: British folklore and Margaret Murray in a 1930 crime novel and beyond 12. Et in arcadia ego: British folk horror film and television 13. Bloody Europe: Brexit and the making of a myth 14. Folkloric landscapes and the heroic outlaw in Britain and Ireland 15. 'Our community could start our own traditions': the commingling of religion, politics, and the folkloresque in a far right groupuscule 16. Blood, blots and belonging: English Heathens their (ab)uses of folklore 17. The Tale of Hanan the Tailor: storytelling in times of change