Title Strange and secret peoples : fairies and Victorian consciousness / Carole G. Silver

Published New York : Oxford University Press, 1999

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Description 1 online resource (xiv, 272 pages) : illustrations Summary Teeming with creatures, both real and imagined, this encyclopedic study in cultural history illuminates the hidden web of connections between the Victorian fascination with fairies and their lore and the dominant preoccupations of Victorian culture at large. Carole Silver here draws on sources ranging from the anthropological, folkloric, and occult to the legal, historical, and medical. She is the first to anatomize a world peopled by strange beings who have infiltrated both the; literary and visual masterpieces and the minor works of the writers and painters of that era.; Examining the period of 1798 to 1923, Strange and Secret Peoples focuses not only on such popular literary figures as Charles Dickens and William Butler Yeats, but on writers as diverse as Thomas Carlyle, Arthur Conan Doyle, and Charlotte Mew; on artists as varied as mad Richard Dadd, Aubrey Beardsley, and Sir Joseph Noel Paton; and on artifacts ranging from fossil skulls to photographs and vases. Silver demonstrates how beautiful and monstrous creatures-fairies and swan maidens, ; goblins and dwarfs, cretins and changelings, elementals and pygmies-simultaneously peopled the Victorian imagination and inhabited nineteenth-century science and belief. Her book reveals the astonishing complexity and fertility of the Victorian consciousness: its modernity and antiquity, its desire to naturalize; the supernatural, its pervasive eroticism fused with sexual anxiety, and its drive for racial and imperial dominion Bibliography Includes bibliographical references (pages 235-250) and index Notes Print version record Subject Fairies. Folklore -- Great Britain. Literature and folklore -- Great Britain British literature -- 19th century -- History and criticism SOCIAL SCIENCE -- Folklore & Mythology. British literature Fairies Folklore Literature and folklore Social conditions Märchen Volksglaube Feeën. Elfen. Kabouters (folklore) Sprookjesfiguren. Victoriaanse tijd. SUBJECT Great Britain -- Social conditions -- 19th century. http://id.loc.gov/authorities/subjects/sh85056943 Subject Great Britain Großbritannien Genre/Form Criticism, interpretation, etc. Form Electronic book LC no. 98010318 ISBN 9780198028468 0198028466 9786610470778 6610470774 9780195144116 0195144112

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