Jason Marc Harris, Folklore and the Fantastic in Nineteenth-Century British Fiction

Abstract

Jason Marc Harris’s Folklore and the Fantastic in 19th-century British Fiction aims to examine how Victorian artists and writers “transformed folk beliefs and motifs for aesthetic, historical, and scientific ends” (vii). Harris looks at what he terms “folk narratives”, “folk legends (volksagen)” and fairy tales (marchen) so as to analyse how authors rework “folk metaphysics” into prose narratives. In fact, Harris contends, because the Victorian period is branded by rationalism, the reworking ...