Victorian Fantasy Research Articles

Illustrating Alice in Wonderland in the New Millennium: New Meanings for an Evergreen Children’s Classic

The link between words and pictures is an internal feature of children’s literature. This bundle of meanings can be a real challenge for the translator, who has to work both on words and on the pictures and their relation to the words. All this is particularly important when a text has been originated with pictures as an integral part of it, with continuous inter-referential connections between words and pictures and whose illustrations were decided by the author of the book, as it is the case for “Alice inWonderland” by Lewis Carroll, a text which had been re-translated and re-edited several times, by providing it with new sets of images. Thus, the aim of this paper is to show the visual representations of Alice in the last decade, comparing the original drawings by Tenniel with the pictures used in Italian publications, in the attempt to unveil new ways in which Carroll’s character and her world have moved from a Victorian fantasy in order to gain eventually new cultural meanings

Shakespeare and vampires at the fin de siècle

This article illuminates Henry Irving’s production of Shakespeare’s Cymbeline (1896) as a major contribution to fin-de-siècle Gothic culture. Cymbeline (1896) was one of the most popular Victorian Shakespeare productions, running to wild acclaim for more than seventy-two performances. In Cymbeline’s sexually-charged bedroom scene, Imogen, played by beloved Victorian actress Ellen Terry, was preyed upon by Henry Irving’s villainous Iachimo. Terry and Irving were at the zenith of a twenty-year partnership at London’s Lyceum theatre, and Victorian Britain’s greatest star actors. Ellen Terry’s Imogen became an ideally desirable heroine for both audiences and critics of Victorian Shakespeare. Simultaneously, Cymbeline, and the acclaimed performances of Terry and Irving, became a source for literature’s most famous Gothic vampire novel: Dracula, published by Bram Stoker in 1897. Bram Stoker was Henry Irving’s business manager, and intimately involved with Irving and Terry’s professional lives at the Lyceum theatre. This article reveals the relationship between Shakespeare and Dracula, especially Ellen Terry’s Imogen as an inspiration for Lucy Westenra. Textual evidence includes Terry’s correspondence and unpublished promptbooks, as well as Stoker’s biography of Henry Irving, and facsimile notes on Dracula. Examining Cymbeline (1896) and Dracula (1897) offers a new reading of Dracula, given Cymbeline’s obsession with liminal states and female vulnerability. Moreover, Victorian responses to Ellen Terry’s Imogen in the bedchamber scene highlight fin-de-siècle eroticisations of the sleeping woman, and Victorian fantasies of sexual access to the actress. Examining Terry’s reception illuminates the disjunction between performed female passivity as Imogen, and the professional, creative activity that underlined Terry’s stage practice and agency as a Victorian actress.

ETERNAL RETURNS: A CHRISTMAS CAROL'S GHOSTS OF REPETITION

In spite of the supernatural trappings of Charles Dickens's most famous work, A Christmas Carol, critics from G. K. Chesterton to Edmund Wilson have found its equally famous protagonist, Ebenezer Scrooge, to be a real character, more fleshed-out and compelling than many of the characters of Dickens's longer, presumably more “serious” novels. Much of the reaction to A Christmas Carol and its protean anti-hero can be summarized by Stephen Prickett's succinct appraisal in his seminal study, Victorian Fantasy: “The strength of A Christmas Carol lies quite simply in its psychological credibility” (54). Scrooge is a character we can believe in, a character that, as Margaret Atwood suggests, “remains fresh and vital. ‘Scrooge Lives!’ we might write on our T-shirts” (xiii).

The Cult of Artistry in Zelda Fitzgerald's Save Me the Waltz

The Cult of Artistry in Zelda Fitzgerald's <i>Save Me the Waltz</i>

The Cult of Artistry in Zelda Fitzgerald's Save Me the Waltz

The Cult of Artistry in Zelda Fitzgerald's <i>Save Me the Waltz</i>

Prescriptivists vs. Descriptivists: Defining Steampunk

There was a time, not so long ago, when the definition of steampunk was generally agreed upon. As late as 2005, F. Brett Cox’s entry in the Greenwood Encyclopedia of Science Fiction and Fantasy defined steampunk in essentially the same way as Peter Nicholls did in the Encyclopedia of Science Fiction (1993), whose definition was little changed from K.W. Jeter’s coining of the term in a letter published in the April 1987 issue of Locus magazine to refer to his “gonzo-historical” explorations of “Victorian fantasies” and alternative technologies (57). How things have changed. As of summer 2011, the term has become an intense semantic and philosophical battleground, albeit one whose combatants have little time for or interest in their opponents. The combatants are the prescriptivists, who maintain that only the Jeter/Nicholls definition is the correct one, and the descriptivists, whose preferred definition of the term is far broader than Jeter/Nicholls and reflects its current (shambolic) status rather than its past (traditional) use. The descriptivists are winning. “Steampunk” appears as a designation for everything from the Western-flavored space opera Firefly (2005) to pseudoEdwardian colonialist high adventure anime, from the industrial dance music of the band Abney Park to the current alternative fashion of mock-Victorian clothing. The struggle between the descriptivists and the prescriptivists is by no means over—at the moment steampunk is a fad, but once the faddists move on, steampunk will in all likelihood return to being primarily a literary category. Until then, steampunk will remain a catch-all term without an agreed-upon definition, and thus a term of little critical utility. The articles and books reviewed here reflect this lack of consensus and clarity. Steampunk Prime is thoroughly traditional, as befits its late-nineteenthand early-twentieth-century contents. The authors of the articles in the special issue of Neo-Victorian Studies only partially accept the developments of the past six years and are as much traditional, and prescriptivist, as they are descriptivist. Steampunk II: Steampunk Reloaded firmly embraces the descriptivist position. In the foreword to Steampunk Prime, Paul di Filippo perhaps wisely avoids any attempt at defining steampunk, instead portraying it as a kind of cadet branch of mainstream science fiction—the 2010s version of the New Wave and

On a Darkling Plain: Victorian Liberalism and the Fantasy of Agency

At the climactic crisis in Ian McEwan's recent novel, Saturday (2005), set in the days before the United States declares war on Iraq, Matthew Arnold's "Dover Beach" (1867) saves the day. Not a poem generally known for its optimism, let alone for its salvific capacities—"for the world...Hath really neither joy, nor love, nor light, / Nor certitude, nor peace, nor help for pain" (30–34)—"Dover Beach" manages, even so, to tranquilize the savage pathology of a home intruder. This intruder, who is called Baxter, seeks payback for a humiliating confrontation between himself and the protagonist of the novel, Henry Perowne, earlier in the day, when their cars had randomly collided on a London street that had been barricaded to control the historic number of Britons protesting the Anglo-American march to war. Baxter and Perowne confront one another as class opposites: the lower-class tough, whose angry intention is all fists and kicks, and the upper-class professional, all brain, no brawn, and now bloodied, who yet has the last word when he defuses Baxter's embodied aggression into an abstract diagnosis of Huntington's disease. The impending rape is therefore for Baxter much more about regaining his bodily authority than revenging the ding on his car. With a knife at the throat of a wife, and an intent to ravage a daughter, Baxter listens to the naked young woman recite Arnold's masterpiece, is apparently overcome with awe at the human-made beauty of it, and gives up his violent ambition. McEwan is too shrewd an observer of his contemporary moment to attempt an unironized translation of Miranda taming Caliban; McEwan sees all too well the bad faith at work in the story of the beauty and her beast.1 If, in his mesmerized admiration of the poem, Baxter is rendered awestruck, he is also rendered a dupe, for he is led to believe that the poem is the daughter's own creation—a ruse [End Page 92] that is equally effective on the eminent neurosurgeon Perowne, who knows the brain but apparently not its culture. After some moments of confusion, he too is arrested by this poem that he thinks his beloved Daisy has penned. In the thick of these misattributions of authorship, "Dover Beach" nonetheless saves this Saturday in the lives of these characters. Incredible and surely repulsive if proffered merely as a rape prevention technique, as deployed in this way Arnold's poem dramatizes a powerful fantasy, a Victorian fantasy that still entices us. The explicit claims that Arnold himself might wish to make for "Dover Beach" and art more generally—something about art's capacity to humanize the Baxters of our day—just doesn't seem politically correct or even very plausible in a post-9/11 era. Even so, at a moment of acute danger, when terrorists both domestic and foreign amass—"as on a darkling plain / Swept with confused alarms of struggle and flight, / Where ignorant armies clash by night" (35–37)—"Dover Beach" delivers to this little group the very loveliest version of the Victorian fantasy of liberal agency: "Ah love, let us be true / To one another!" (29–30). Arnold's poem, of course, is much more than a love poem, for it details his belief in the liberal subject's ability to seek out a private space of thoughtful emotion, of human intimacy, where subjects alienated in mind or body can become fully authentic and intentional in relation to themselves and to each other, in spite of the chaotic world without. To what extent McEwan himself indulges in this fantasy of liberalism is difficult to measure, but the author does allow Perowne his own version of "Dover Beach."2 Having helped to push the distracted Baxter down a flight of stairs, gravely injuring him, Perowne then volunteers to operate on his damaged brain. By demonstrating his powers of detachment, his...

Victorian Fantasy, by Stephen Prickett

Victorian Fantasy, by Stephen Prickett

Media, Discourse, and the Public Sphere: Electronic Memorials to Diana, Princess of Wales

before she married the Prince of Wales, Queen Elizabeth's son Charles, in 1982. The highly publicized wedding was called a fairy tale. Lady arrived at St. Paul's Cathedral in London in a golden coach. Her dress was a Victorian fantasy, yards of ivory silk billowing over crinolines. Charles wore ceremonial military regalia. The wedding catapulted her into international stardom. In the ensuing years, became a mother to the future king, William, and his brother, Harry, but following admissions of adultery by and Charles, the Prince and Princess separated in 1992 and their divorce was granted August 28, 1996. One year later, on August 31, 1997, was killed in a car crash in Paris. The public life of Spencer was bound at two ends by spectacle: her marriage and her funeral. Her marriage into the Royal Family of England made her into a celebrity, a princess who would be queen, and in the intervening seventeen years until her death, she lived a life in front of print and visual media as a humanitarian and fabulously coifed jet-setter. Her funeral attracted hundreds of mourners to London and was watched by millions on worldwide television. Because of the spectacular nature of her presentation to the public, accrued a public sphere about her presence, one that crossed class and national lines. The events of her life were eagerly watched and anticipated by an audience who initiated a partially fictional discourse about an ontological who eventually became Diana as character and icon.1 The ordinary person's experience of characters and events is mediated by electronic technology, which forms a popular memory. In a society of technological complexity, the difference

Monster soup: the microscope and Victorian fantasy

The Victorian predilection for the grotesque owed more than is commonly recognised to nature's microdimension. During the heyday of natural history in Britain (c. 1820–70), the microscope revealed myriads of shapes and creatures so utterly unfamiliar that writers on the subject resorted to flamboyant prose in order to render them intelligible. This had reverberations not least for the visual arts. The metaphors chosen by authors attempting to describe the microscopic world soon developed a visual presence, with supernatural features being projected even onto illustrations in supposedly scientific contexts. At the same time, such illustrations share certain motifs and/or stylistic characteristics with fairy paintings and illustrations by artists such as Daniel Maclise (1806–70), Richard Dadd (1817–86), Sir Joseph Noel Paton (1821–1901), and Arthur Hughes (1832–1915). In view of this, the fact that the golden age of British fairy painting coincided chronologically with the Victorian craze for microscopy seems to be the result of more than mere chance. If we acknowledge this, we must also ask whether, in the mid nineteenth century, points of contact between microscopy and the visual arts led to a liberation or else a limitation of fantasy.

Monster soup: the microscope and Victorian fantasy

The Victorian predilection for the grotesque owed more than is commonly recognised to nature's microdimension. During the heyday of natural history in Britain (c. 1820–70), the microscope revealed myriads of shapes and creatures so utterly unfamiliar that writers on the subject resorted to flamboyant prose in order to render them intelligible. This had reverberations not least for the visual arts. The metaphors chosen by authors attempting to describe the microscopic world soon developed a visual presence, with supernatural features being projected even onto illustrations in supposedly scientific contexts. At the same time, such illustrations share certain motifs and/or stylistic characteristics with fairy paintings and illustrations by artists such as Daniel Maclise (1806–70), Richard Dadd (1817–86), Sir Joseph Noel Paton (1821–1901), and Arthur Hughes (1832–1915). In view of this, the fact that the golden age of British fairy painting coincided chronologically with the Victorian craze for microscopy seems to be the result of more than mere chance. If we acknowledge this, we must also ask whether, in the mid nineteenth century, points of contact between microscopy and the visual arts led to a liberation or else a limitation of fantasy.

Three Ways of Looking at Victorian Fantasies

Three Ways of Looking at Victorian Fantasies Jan Susina (bio) An Expression of Character: The Letters of George MacDonald, ed. Glenn Edward Sadler. Grand Rapids, Mich.: Eerdmans, 1994. The Literary Products of the Lewis Carroll-George MacDonald Friendship, by John Docherty. Lewiston, N.Y.: Meilen, 1995. Inventing Wonderland: The Lives and Fantasies of Lewis Carroll, Edward Lear, J. M. Barrie, Kenneth Grahame, and A. A. Milne, by Jackie Wullschlèger. New York: Free, 1995. These three books cover the same general subject: the life and literary works of major Victorian fantasy writers for children. Since Sadler, Docherty, and Wullschlèger use different critical approaches to their topic, it is fascinating to realize how little these books as a group have in common with one another. The George MacDonald who emerges from Sadler's massive collection of letters barely resembles the George MacDonald whom Docherty shows to be a writer involved in an intense and extended literary wrestling match with Lewis Carroll. Only one single letter to Carroll appears in Sadler's volume, a brief response to Carroll's request for an introduction to Noel Paton, whom Carroll was considering as a possible illustrator for Looking-Glass. The Lewis Carroll who provides the title for Wullschlèger's group biography of five pivotal Victorian and Edwardian fantasy writers is not the same Carroll who Docherty claims was involved in a long-standing literary and religious debate with MacDonald that, he suggests, resulted in their children's books being filled with reciprocating allusions. MacDonald is excluded from Wullschlèger's master list of fantasy writers and barely makes a mention in her book. Sadler's An Expression of Character is a much-needed collection of letters of George MacDonald, perhaps best known by children's literature scholars for At the Back of the North Wind, The Princess and the Goblin, and The Princess and Curdie, as well as his many visionary fairy tales. Sadler has also edited the outstanding two-volume The Gifts of the Child [End Page 205] Christ: Fairy Tales and Stories for the Childlike(Eerdmans, 1973), which is the standard edition for MacDonald's fairy tales. An Expression of Character will undoubtedly find an important and useful place next to The Gifts of the Child Christ and William Raeper's George MacDonald (Lion, 1987) as essential scholarly texts for anyone wishing to do serious critical work on MacDonald. Sadler has chronologically arranged more than three hundred letters divided into six major periods of MacDonald's life. Sadler provides necessary annotations to the correspondence, an accurate register of the letters, and an index to the people and places mentioned in the collection. Although not as extensive or detailed in its scholarly notes as Morton Cohen's two-volume The Letters of Lewis Carroll (Oxford, 1979), An Expression of Character is a treasure trove for those interested in MacDonald's religious beliefs. There is one great limitation to this volume, however, although the fault lies not with Sadler but with MacDonald. MacDonald's withdrawal into total silence during the final years of his life is well known, as is the complexity of his highly mystical and mythopoetic prose. Any reader hoping to find the "golden key" to unlock the mysteries of his intricate fantasies will be sorely disappointed. In one letter to a cousin, MacDonald explains, "A man whose business is writing is seldom fond of letters" (328). Although MacDonald dutifully wrote hundreds of letters, they are surprisingly flat and impersonal when compared to his emotionally and erotically charged fiction. The only two letters that equal MacDonald's published work are a touching letter to John Ruskin written four days after the death of Rose La Touche and a guiltily penned note to Thomas Carlyle begging him to duplicate a letter written to a mutual friend that MacDonald had inadvertently misplaced. MacDonald avoids analysis of his work in the letters; as he wrote to A. P. Watt, his literary agent, "I will do nothing to bring my personality before the public in any way farther than my work in itself necessitates" (355). Occasionally there is a brief reference to his own work, such as the letter to his wife in which...

Victorian Fantasy Fiction Is No Longer Just for the Childlike

Victorian Fantasy Fiction Is No Longer Just for the Childlike

Women in Victorian Fantasy

Women in Victorian Fantasy Anita Wilson (bio) Honig, Edith Lazaros . Breaking the Angelic Image: Woman Power in Victorian Children's Fantasy. Westport, CT: Greenwood, 1988. In Breaking the Angelic Image, Edith Lazaros Honig explores the "notions of femaleness that Victorian children acquired from their fantastic readings," and posits that Victorian fantasy provides a literary link between Victorian and modern fictional women. Her study is structured around four types of recurrent female characters in Victorian children's fantasy: mothers, single women (spinsters), girls, and "magical women" who combine "almost godlike power with feminine grace." Taking Alice's Adventures in Wonderland as a touchstone, Honig also focuses upon fantasies by George MacDonald, Mrs. Molesworth, E. Nesbit, James Barrie, and Ford Madox Ford. Additional works are discussed less extensively, including Ruskin's The King of the Golden River, Dickens's Christmas Carol and The Magic Fishbone, Thackeray's The Rose and the Ring, Grahame's The Wind in the Willows, two tales by Frances Hodgson Burnett, and two Alice imitations, Wanted—A King, by Maggie Browne, and The Wallypug of Why, by George Edward Farrow. Honig's list of selected works is fairly predictable, since she chose to concentrate on "a small number of popular, well written, truly memorable fantasies." Although this is a reasonable approach, it would be interesting to see how Honig's analysis of female characters might apply to second-rate Victorian fantasy literature. Restricting the list to book-length fantasies also eliminates some briefer literary fairy tales with significant female characters, such as Margaret Gatty's The Fairy Godmothers and Lucy Clifford's "The New Mother." Honig draws upon Gilbert and Gubar's The Madwoman in the Attic and Nina Auerbach's Woman and the Demon, among others, in arguing that Victorian fantasy constituted "a subversive element, a . . . quiet rebellion," in its portrayal of non-stereotypical female characters of all ages. Mothers, frequently idealized in Victorian children's fiction, were often rather distant figures in children's fantasy; this enabled authors to grant a degree of independence to their juvenile characters and to avoid the idealized maternal image without defying it overtly. As Honig points out, the distancing of mothers in fantasy literature did not necessarily render them inconsequential or weak characters. The mother in E. Nesbit's Five Children and It plays a minor role but is strong and capable when a crisis arises—hence her nickname, "The General." Even the comically vicious Duchess in Alice in Wonderland counteracts the maternal "Angel in the House" stereotype by going to the opposite extreme. The portrayal of spinsters divides along gender lines. Female authors were more likely to acknowledge the achievement and satisfaction that unmarried women could find in work, generally as teachers or governesses. Male writers usually depicted "beautiful, young, nonworking spinsters who end up happily married." A notable exception is George MacDonald's complex and sympathetic portrait of Lilith, who achieves some control over her life without rebelling overtly against male authority figures. More numerous and significant were portrayals of girls and "magical women" in Victorian fantasy. Honig regards the latter as the first positive depiction of powerful women in Victorian fiction. For a writer like Mrs. Molesworth, who wrote over one hundred books while raising seven children, and who eventually separated from her husband after years of a difficult marriage, "the magical woman afforded . . . an opportunity to show the real power of women like herself." More well developed and intriguing, however, were the magical women in George MacDonald's fantasies: the North Wind, the grandmother in The Golden Key, old Irene in The Princess and the Goblin and The Princess and Curdie, and Watho in The Day Boy and the Night Girl. The North Wind's relationship with Diamond shows that power and maternal love are not incompatible; in fact, as Honig observes, the North Wind enhances the maternal image in ways that Diamond's sweet and sentimental mother cannot. The grandmothers combine qualities of power and beauty with the wisdom of old age, providing role models for young girls like Tangle in The Golden Key who "need not wither into submissive adulthood" but instead can mature into women of strength as well as beauty. Watho, whose...

The Arthurian Revival in Victorian Art by Debra N. Mancoff (review)

Reviews105 engagement with virtually everyone who has written about Tennyson during the last forty years, he demonstrates how our criticism of Tennyson is always implicated in other people's comments. Tennyson's Characters begins with an account of an actual critical seminar and ends with a meditation on Merlin as the archetypal critic. Tennyson, who had his own anxious fascination with critics, knew that all his commentators long to be Merlins: And none can read the text, not even I; And none can read the comment but myself; And in the comment did I find the charm. ("Merlin and Vivien" 679-81) Peter Hinchcliffe St Jerome's College University of Waterloo Debra N. Mancoff. The Arthurian Revival in Victorian Art. New York: Garland, 1990. xxü + 358 + Plates. $75.00 US (cloth). The author wrote a dissertation on this subject several years ago, but this new study is a superior, more sophisticated and authoritative version of that material in terms of writing, analytical insight, and research. Organized into eight chapters and accompanied by 101 black and white and eight color plates, this perceptive book raises many important issues in the Introduction which reflect recent revisionist and iconological approaches as well as Mancoff1 s own critical intelUgence in marshalling several interdisciplinary areas of inquiry. One of her major points consistently threading throughout the text concerns the subliminal appeal to the Victorian period of King Arthur, whom she convincingly describes as a modern counterpoint to both Queen Victoria and Prince Albert and, simultaneously, as an emerging metaphor of national identity. Advising readers of Arthur ' s mythopoetic origins, Mancoff in this opening section provides a very useful overview of the warrior king and the connotations of virtue and honour which he embodied in oral and written traditions from the twelfth to the nineteenth centuries. 106Victorian Review Chapter One continues to untangle various sources and permutations of the Arthurian Legend, suggesting how both escapist and archaeological attitudes differed in their interpretations and focus. The related tenets of the Gothic Revival influenced an entire earlier generation of artists and architects, thus setting the stage for Victorian fantasies about the Middle Ages. Indeed, the Victorians generally envisioned medievalism as a better, more moral and ideal period of existence. These preconceptions served to strengthen, as Chapter Two affirms, what Mancoff calls "ethical medievalism and revivalist chivalry," and these forces further entrenched the Arthurian legend as "a paradigm of action, time-honoured and indisputably British" (28). For the metaphor truly to succeed, however, much less for it to become internalized as an integral part of the national identity, the Victorians had to see themselves in the legend, and the author suggests that this is precisely what happened. Accordingly, the "Arthurian metaphor was empowered as a moral exemplar and a transforming mirror, inspiring the modern Englishman to strive for the standards of his mythic fathers, while seeing himself reflected in their glorified image" (29). In terms of revivalist chivalry, the seeds of this had been sown—for example, in the earlier nineteenth-century writings of George Ellis and in the historical novels of Sir Walter Scott and Kenhelm H. Digby. These resulted in a literary cult of the knight which, as an encoded emblem of modern behaviour and ideals, "held a flattering mirror to the image of the upper-class male, who embraced its reflection with enthusiasm" (48). The romanticizing of the knight as an appealing modern hero was also highly visible in popular culture in such events as tournaments and processions, and even the High Church Movement was able to incorporate the high-born, morally and socially responsible male into its own ethical creeds. Equally strong is the third section on "Politics, Painting, and the New Palace at Westminster," which reflects considerable original research and synthesis, especially on the proposed evolution of the interior palace decorations. In addition, Mancoff briefly outlines a survey of national art sponsorship, adding to the recent (long over-due) spurt of scholarship on art patronage and here remarkably free of theoretical jargon. She also provides readers with important background on the rise and role ofhistory painting in Britain, at the same time indicating the inherent strengths and weaknesses of this lofty gerne of art...

Nineteenth-Century Children's Satire and the Ambivalent Reader

Nineteenth-Century Children's Satire and the Ambivalent Reader Alan Richardson (bio) Satire is initially hard to place in the history of children's literature because little or no place has been made for it. Most accounts of the development of British children's literature from its emergence in the middle of the eighteenth century to its "golden age" in the Victorian period describe a happy shift from primarily didactic works to primarily imaginative ones: from reason to fantasy, from instruction to delight, from the moral tale to the fairy tale. According to this frankly progressive model (most recently articulated by Geoffrey Summerfield in his study Fantasy and Reason), children's literature had to be liberated from its early dominance by rationalists and Christian moralists, in order for the wiser age of Victorian fantasy, with its "more open imagination" (Pickering 4), to blossom from the fairy tale revival of the earlier nineteenth century. I have argued elsewhere that this model does not adequately reflect the extent to which fairy tales were (to borrow Jack Zipes's term) "bourgeoisified" (29) in order to become accepted as reading fit for children, a process through which the distinction between didactic and fantastic often breaks down, as in the moral or moralized fairy tale characteristic of the period (Richardson). But this model also obscures—or keeps from becoming articulated—certain latent assumptions underlying both didactic and much fantastic children's literature as well, assumptions rooted in the fundamentally new conception of childhood which emerged along with (and helped make possible) the children's publishing industry. It is in analyzing the resistance not to children's fairy tales but to children's satire, a resistance left out of histories of children's literature, that our own cultural assumptions regarding children and their books—which we inherit from eighteenth-century moralists and nineteenth-century fantasists alike—can be called into question. Both the moral tale and the children's fairy tale, for example, share an underlying assumption that the child reader is not to make independent moral evaluations. In the moral tale, a child protagonist may be required to make a moral judgment, but it is always made clear to the child reader (usually through a [End Page 122] controlling parental figure) which course of action is the correct one. And even when the child is not explicitly instructed in the morality of its age and class, the fiction can be seen as taking place in a fundamentally amoral fictional world. That is, in the cases in which literary fairy tales for children do not simply (like more frankly didactic literature) reflect the social morality of the day—as Wilhelm Grimm assured readers of the revised Kinder- und Hausmärchen they would (Tatar 217)—they can be seen as essentially irrelevant to discussions of social morality altogether. This is the brunt of Coleridge's famous response to the complaint of Anna Barbauld (a relatively enlightened didactic writer for children herself) that the Rime of the Ancient Mariner "had no moral": "It ought to have had no more moral than the Arabian Night's tale of the merchant's sitting down to eat dates by the side of a well, and throwing the shells aside, and lo! a genie starts up, and says he must kill the aforesaid merchant because one of the dates had, it seems, put out the eye of the genie's son" (405). Whether, like Nicholas Tucker, we view the world of fairy tales as a "morally-charged universe" (76) or, like Coleridge, as a morally empty space where questions of value become meaningless, the fairy tale exacts no more complicated an ethical response from the child reader than does the moral tale. Satire, on the other hand, as the "literary genre most implicated in historical and social particulars" (Howes 217), deals almost by definition with the revaluation of social values, and children's satire, unlike children's fantasy, found no early defenders among the Romantics or elsewhere. In fact, advocates of imaginative literature for children could make common ground with didactic writers in attacking satirical works intended for or made available to children. The tacit notion that children should remain morally naive...

Fantasy Fiction and Related Genres

Fantasy Fiction and Related Genres Dieter Petzold (bio) I Among the problems that have come into view since academic teachers and learned societies laid their hands on fantasy fiction (ff), once the domain of fanclubs and arcane magazines, the question of definition is one of the most intriguing. If ff is not simply anything that will sell as ff, what is it? In what sense can it be said to be a genre? If it is a genre, what is its history? To date, there have been more than a dozen book-length attempts in English and a few in other languages to answer these questions, plus a number of periodical essays dealing with the same problem.1 What strikes the observer most about these investigations is their scope of disagreement. If one author asserts that as a genre, "fantasy" has existed only since the 1960s (Pesch 23), another claims that it flowered between 1880 and 1957 (Irwin x), and yet another categorically denies fantasy the status [End Page 11] of a genre (Hume 21). Terms such as "imaginative," "speculative," "fantastic," and "fantasy" are used in widely different and sometimes conflicting ways; there is disagreement about what books are typical examples of ff and about the relation of ff to other genres such as science fiction (sf), fairy tales, Gothic stories, and so on. In this situation, it may seem presumptuous to make yet another attempt at resolving the problems that so many competent people have already tried to solve. However, unless we prefer to push the question aside (ignominious desertion before the enemy, in my view), we need not fewer but more ideas and proposals to be examined and tested as to their plausibility and usefulness. The following remarks are to be understood as suggestions of that kind, no more than a sketch much in need of fleshing out, but I hope useful in that it might provide impulses for further research. II Part of the problem lies in the ambiguity of the word "fantasy." The Oxford English Dictionary lists no less than seven separate meanings, plus a large number of subdivisions. The definition "a genre of literary compositions" appears only in the 1972 supplement, the earliest instance mentioned being the title of the 1949 Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction. It would certainly be illusory to expect that a general agreement could be reached, but at least we need to be aware that writers may mean different things when they talk about "fantasy." In spite of the definition quoted, and of well-known books such as Manlove's Modern Fantasy and Prickett's Victorian Fantasy, I should like to plead for the use of either "fantasy literature" or "fantasy fiction" (the two, for all practical purposes, can be regarded as synonymous) as the term denoting a concrete body of texts (that is, a genre), reserving the term "fantasy" for meanings such as "sub-creative art" (Tolkien, "Fairy-Stories" 55), "an impulse native to literature" (Hume 21), or "a natural human activity" (Tolkien, "Fairy-Stories" 56). We need to realize also that some writers use "fantastic" simply as the adjective derived from or corresponding to "fantasy," whereas others, mainly under the influence of French criticism, use the word in a much more restricted sense, applying it exclusively to Gothic fiction and related genres of the uncanny.2 Confusion could be avoided either by retaining [End Page 12] the French fantastique when this restricted sense is meant (as Hume does) or by taking up a suggestion made by Clayton (as I shall do in this essay) who, for reasons to be discussed later, introduces the nonce-word "fantasmatic" (62). Another lesson to be learned from existing attempts at definition is that ff cannot be defined exclusively in terms of subject matter, form, or function. Though all these aspects are certainly important for an understanding of the genre, they are secondary insofar as they do not provide categories that can be used in a rigorously systematic way. Any list of "typical traits" will be in danger of appearing arbitrary. Is it totally imaginary settings that separate ff from other genres? Then how can it be distinguished from sf or fairy tales...

The Balancing of Child and Adult: An Approach to Victorian Fantasies for Children

MUCH has been written on socializing aspects of children's literature, on this or that classic's promotion of maturity and healthy growth. Yet children's books, especially works of fantasy, rely just as heavily on artist's ability to tap a rich reservoir of regressive yearnings. Such works can be said to hover between states of perception that William Blake had labeled innocence and experience. From vantage point of experience, an adult imagination re-creates an earlier childhood self in order to steer it towards reality principle. From vantage point of innocence, however, that childhood agent may resist imposition of adult values and stubbornly demand that its desire to linger in a realm of magic and wonder be satisfied. Like Blake's two contrary states, these conflicting impulses thus remain locked into a dynamic that acknowledges simultaneous yet opposing demands of growth and arrest. It is no coincidence that self-divided Victorians who found themselves wandering between two worlds in their Janus-like split between progress and nostalgia should have produced what has rightly been called the Golden Age of children's books.' Earlier

The Balancing of Child and Adult: An Approach to Victorian Fantasies for Children

The Balancing of Child and Adult: An Approach to Victorian Fantasies for Children

Review: Dickens and the Invisible World: Fairy Tales, Fantasy, and Novel-Making., by Harry Stone and Victorian Fantasy., by Stephen Prickett

Book Review| March 01 1981 Review: Dickens and the Invisible World: Fairy Tales, Fantasy, and Novel-Making., by Harry Stone and Victorian Fantasy., by Stephen Prickett Dickens and the Invisible World: Fairy Tales, Fantasy, and Novel-Making.Harry StoneVictorian Fantasy.Stephen Prickett George Ford George Ford Search for other works by this author on: This Site PubMed Google Scholar Nineteenth-Century Fiction (1981) 35 (4): 540–543. https://doi.org/10.2307/3044624 Views Icon Views Article contents Figures & tables Video Audio Supplementary Data Peer Review Share Icon Share Twitter LinkedIn Tools Icon Tools Get Permissions Cite Icon Cite Search Site Citation George Ford; Review: Dickens and the Invisible World: Fairy Tales, Fantasy, and Novel-Making., by Harry Stone and Victorian Fantasy., by Stephen Prickett. Nineteenth-Century Fiction 1 March 1981; 35 (4): 540–543. doi: https://doi.org/10.2307/3044624 Download citation file: Ris (Zotero) Reference Manager EasyBib Bookends Mendeley Papers EndNote RefWorks BibTex toolbar search Search Dropdown Menu toolbar search search input Search input auto suggest filter your search All ContentNineteenth-Century Literature Search This content is only available via PDF. Copyright 1981 Regents of the University of California Article PDF first page preview Close Modal You do not currently have access to this content.