This book examines the fairy in the work of many Victorian painters, novelists and poets.

Publisher Description

How have fairy tales from around the world changed over the centuries? What do they tell us about different cultures and societies? This volume explores the period when the European fairy tales conquered the world and shaped the global imagination in its own image. Examining how collectors, children's writers, poets, and artists seized the form to challenge convention and normative ideas, this book explores the fantastic imagination that belies the nineteenth century's materialist and pedestrian reputation. Looking at writers including E.T.A Hoffman, the Brothers Grim, S.T. Coleridge, Walter Scott, Oscar Wilde, Christina Rosetti, George MacDonald, and E. Nesbit, the volume shows how fairy tales touched every aspect of nineteenth century life and thought. It provides new insights into themes including: forms of the marvelous, adaptation, gender and sexuality, humans and non-humans, monsters and the monstrous, spaces, socialization, and power. With contributions from international scholars across disciplines, this volume is an essential resource for researchers, scholars and students of literature, history, and cultural studies. A Cultural History of Fairy Tales (6-volume set) A Cultural History of Fairy Tales in Antiquity is also available as a part of a 6-volume set, A Cultural History of Fairy Tales, tracing fairy tales from antiquity to the present day, available in print, or within a fully-searchable digital library accessible through institutions by annual subscription or on perpetual access (see www.bloomsburyculturalhistory.com). Individual volumes for academics and researchers interested in specific historical periods are also available digitally via www.bloomsburycollections.com.

Literary Cultures and Nineteenth-Century Childhoods explores the construction of the child and the development of texts for children in the nineteenth century through the application of fresh theoretical approaches and attention to aspects of literary childhoods that have only recently begun to be illuminated. This scope enables examination of the child in canonical nineteenth-century novels by Charles Dickens, Elizabeth Gaskell, Charlotte Bronte, and Thomas Hardy alongside well-known fiction intended for young readers by George MacDonald, Christabel Coleridge, and Kate Greenaway. The century was also distinctive for the rise of the children’s magazine, and this book broadens the definition of literary cultures to include magazines produced both by, and for, young people. The volume examines how the child and family are conceptualised, how children are positioned as readers in genres including the domestic novel, school story, Robinsonade, and fantasy fiction, how literary childhoods are written and politicised, and how childhood intersects with perceptions of animals and the natural environment. The range of chapters in this collection and the texts they consider demonstrates the variability and fluidity of literary cultures and nineteenth-century childhoods.

First published in 1889, this novel has two main plots; one set in the real world at the time the book was published (the Victorian era), the other in the fictional world of Fairyland.

Jason Marc Harris's ambitious book argues that the tensions between folk metaphysics and Enlightenment values produce the literary fantastic. Demonstrating that a negotiation with folklore was central to the canon of British literature, he explicates the complicated rhetoric associated with folkloric fiction. His analysis includes a wide range of writers, including James Barrie, William Carleton, Charles Dickens, George Eliot, Sheridan Le Fanu, Neil Gunn, George MacDonald, William Sharp, Robert Louis Stevenson, and James Hogg. These authors, Harris suggests, used folklore to articulate profound cultural ambivalence towards issues of class, domesticity, education, gender, imperialism, nationalism, race, politics, religion, and metaphysics. Harris's analysis of the function of folk metaphysics in nineteenth- and early twentieth-century narratives reveals the ideological agendas of the appropriation of folklore and the artistic potential of superstition in both folkloric and literary contexts of the supernatural.

This collection opens with marginalized responses to the highly politicized Cinderella traditions in the Anglophone world. In the United States, Cinderella was incorporated into the gendered narrative of the American Dream and narratives of empire in the colonial world, particularly in the mid-1800s. Marginalized writers have responded to these nationalistic colonial traditions in two distinctive ways: clever Cinderellas who negotiate a broken system or passive Cinderellas who die as anti-heroes in disenchanting fairy tales. This dual tradition of marginalized Cinderellas is also apparent across the Anglophone world. Potential texts include the out-of-print works of Sinèad de Valera, excerpts from the novels of Hannah Crafts, Jessie Fauset, and Julia Kavanagh, along with dramas by Ann Devlin, and collected oral tales.

Fairy Tales, Natural History and Victorian Culture examines how literary fairy tales were informed by natural historical knowledge in the Victorian period, as well as how popular science books used fairies to explain natural history at a time when 'nature' became a much debated word.

This edited collection aims to examine the popularisation of science for children in Britain and France from the middle of the eighteenth century to the end of the Victorian period. It compares and contrasts for the first time popular science works published at the same time in the two countries, focusing both on non-fictional and fictional texts. Starting when children’s literature emerged as a genre to the end of the nineteenth century it addresses the ways in which popular science for children engaged with wider debates and issues, concerning such topics as gender or religion. Each individual essays brings home how children’s literature revealed contemporary tensions which professional scientists confronted. The wide range of scientific topics examined, from physics and astronomy to natural history and anthropology, offers a large spectrum of types of popular science works for children.

This book offers a new history of the fairy tale, revealing the creative role of periodical publication in shaping this popular genre. Sumpter explores the fairy tale's reinvention for (and by) diverse readerships in unexpected contexts, including debates over evolution, colonialism, socialism, gender and sexuality and decadence.