Thankstide: the calendar custom and contemporary fiction

This practice-based research project examines the role and impact of the calendar custom in contemporary fiction in two parts. The first part is Thankstide, a novel set in contemporary England during the course of a fictional village’s calendar custom, exploring five narrative voices and their engagement with the custom, each other, and the wider community. This novel makes an original contribution to knowledge by stressing the ‘everydayness’ of custom; in its cyclical nature, the custom is anticipated by the host community as a high point in the collective calendar. This is a rebuttal of the folk horror tendency of ‘the final ritual’ (Bayman & Donnelly, 2023, p. 15), where the calendar custom is cast as strange, dangerous, and bloodthirsty. Instead, the novel seeks to understand why individuals today might choose to participate (or abstain from participation) in a community-wide tradition and what significance such events may have. The second part is a critical thesis which situates the novel in two scholarly contexts, Folkloristics and Creative Writing. It contributes to knowledge by offering a literature review of the calendar custom in Folkloristics. The critical thesis then presents an analysis of a suite of contemporary novels that include a calendar custom within the narrative, appraising the impact on the text in terms of the development of plot, character, place, and time. This is interwoven with a reflexive interrogation of the writing of Thankstide, and an examination of the novel using frameworks such as Foster’s ‘folkloresque’ (2016) and Bakhtin’s ‘carnivalesque’ (1963/1984). The thesis is augmented by insight offered through interviews with organisers of real-world customs and writers who have presented calendar customs in their fiction. The thesis concludes with a series of provocations for writers intending to work creatively with the calendar custom, to encourage writers to consider the ethics of their representations.