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Spellbound: The Fairy Tale and the Victorians by Molly Clark Hillard (CD-ROM, 2014)

In examining the relationship between fairy tales and Victorian culture, Molly Clark Hillard concludes that the Victorians were spellbound: velists, poets, and playwrights were self-avowedly enchanted by these tales. At the same time, Spellbound: The Fairy Tale and the Victorians shows that literary genres were bound to the fairy tale and dependent on its forms and figures to make meaning. But these spellbound literary artists also feared that fairy tales exuded an originative power that pervaded and precluded authored work. In part to dispel the fairy tale s potency, Victorians resolved this tension by treating the form as a stalgic refuge from an industrial age, a quaint remnant of the pre-literacy of childhood and peasantry, and a form fit t for modern gentlemen but rather for old wives. Through close readings of the vels of Dickens, Eliot, and Charlotte Bronte; the poetry of Tennyson and Christina Rossetti; the visual artistry of Burne-Jones and Punch; and the popular theatricals of dramatists like Planche and Buckingham, Spellbound opens fresh territory into well-traversed titles of the Victorian can. Hillard demonstrates that these literary forms were all cross-pollenated by the fairy tale and that their authors werehowever reluctantlypurveyors of disruptive fairy tale matter over which they had but imperfect control.

Running Time
278
Date of Publication
28/02/2014
Content Note
Illustrations
Country of Publication
United States
Author Biography
Molly Clark Hillard Is Assistant Professor of English at Seattle University.

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