The Victorian Press and the Fairy Tale (Palgrave Studies in Nineteenth-Century Writing and Culture)

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. "Fairy Tales, Natural History and Victorian Culture deals with the way in which natural history was connected to the world of fairies and highlights how shifts in the understanding of natural history, especially after 1859, had a significant impact on fairy stories and Victorian experiments with the literary fairy tale. By exploring the interaction between scientific and literary fields, this book shows the ways in which natural knowledge was shaped and disseminated in Victorian culture and illuminates cultural practices through which new representations of nature and the natural world were popularised. This original approach to Victorian culture, blending studies of fictional and non-fictional narratives, examines therefore a part of the history of the mediation of knowledge about nature in the Victorian period and points out how the mediation of this new knowledge contributed to the Victorians' awareness of environmental issues"-- Provided by publisher "Colonial Girlhood in Literature, Culture and History, 1840-1950 explores a range of real and fictional colonial girlhood experiences from Jamaica, Mauritius, South Africa, India, New Zealand, Australia, England, Ireland, and Canada to reflect on the transitional state of girlhood between childhood and adulthood. The interconnected themes of colonialism, empire, gender, race, and class show how colonial girls occupy ambivalent positions in British and settler societies between 1840 and 1950. Although girlhood is often linked to freedom, independence, novelty, and modernity, it may also represent an idea that needs to be contained and controlled to serve the needs of the nation. Across national boundaries, the malleability of colonial girlhoods is evident. Drawing on a range of approaches including history, anthropology, and literary and cultural studies, this book reflects on the complexities of girlhood during the colonial era."-- Provided by publisher Victorian writers often claimed that the press was killing the fairy tale. In fact, it ensured the genre's popularity, bringing literary tales and folklore to the first mass readerships. Exploring penny weeklies, adult and children's monthlies, little magazines and the labour press, this innovative study is the first to combine media and fairy tale history. Bringing reading communities back into focus, Sumpter explores ingenious political uses of the fairy tale: in debates over socialism, evolution and race, and in the context of women's rights, decadence and gay culture. The book offers new insights into the popularisation of folklore and comparative science, and also recovers neglected visual material. From the fantasies of Kingsley, MacDonald and J.H. Ewing to the writings of Keir Hardie, Laurence Housman and Yeats, Sumpter reveals that the fairy tale was intimately shaped by the press, and that both were at the heart of nineteenth-century culture Front Matter....Pages i-xii Introduction....Pages 1-10 Serialising Scheherazade: An Alternative History of the Fairy Tale....Pages 11-33 Myths of Origin: Folktale Scholarship and Fictional Invention in Magazines for Children....Pages 34-66 Science and Superstition, Realism and Romance: Fairy Tale and Fantasy in the Adult Shilling Monthly....Pages 67-87 ‘I wonder were the fairies Socialists?’: The Politics of the Fairy Tale in the 1890s Labour Press....Pages 88-130 ‘All art is at once surface and symbol’: Fairy Tales and fin-de-siècle Little Magazines....Pages 131-174 Conclusion: Myth in the Marketplace....Pages 175-178 Back Matter....Pages 179-254 Offering a 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