Cover

Half-title

Title page

Copyright information

Table of contents

Acknowledgments

Introduction

White cliffs

‘Celtic’ Britain

Theories of nation

Territory, identity, history and ghosts

Notes

1 Primitive rocks: Humphry Davy, Cornwall’s Geological Society and sublime mineral landscapes

Primitive rocks and the sublime

Minerals and maps

Industrial landscapes

Notes

2 Rocks and race: geological folklore and Celtic literature, from Cornwall to Scotland

British Mining

Hunt’s poetry and its primitivism

Fossils, evolution and the primitive races

Race, region and nation

Cornwall as England and not England

Notes

3 On the cliff edge of England: trembling rocks in sensation fiction and empire Gothic

Walking on cliffs

The threat of the primitive in Basil

Great Western Railway and the edge of England

The mummy’s hand

The Devil’s foot

Extinction, erosion, time travel

Notes

4 Haunted houses and prehistoric stones: savage vibrations in ghost stories and D. H. Lawrence’s Kangaroo

Trevarthen House

Ghost sounds and the ‘stone of sacrifice’

Lawrence’s ‘savage vibrations’

Notes

5 Living stones and the earth: dreams of belonging in Cornish nationalist and New Age environmental writing

‘A hill that lurked and loomed’

Storytelling stones, bones and energies

A ‘bloody foreigner’/‘primeval woman’

New Age eco-nationalism

Notes

6 Clayscapes: decomposed granite in Jack Clemo’s anti-nationalist writing

Clayscapes

Clemo

Heroes

Industrial romance

Escape

Notes

Conclusion

Notes

References

Index