Strange and Secret Peoples: Fairies and Victorian Consciousness

ISBN-13: 9780195121995 / Angielski / Twarda / 1999 / 288 str.

Carole Silver

Opis

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.

Recenzje

"Strange and Secret Peoples is concerned not with eminent Victorians, but with the 'little people'—fairies, elves, mermaids and the like—in whom those eminent Victorians believed. With cogency, clarity, and learning, Carole Silver maps the intricacies of nineteenth-century faith in fairy lore, a faith perhaps more vital in British life than official, organized religion. [This book] is a scintillating work that will appeal to everyone interested in nineteenth-century England, in odd gods and folk beliefs, and, of course, to all readers who believe in fairies."—Nina Auerbach, University of Pennsylvania

O autorze

Carole G. Silver is a Professor of English and holds the Humanities Chair at Yeshiva University (Stern College). She is also Adjunct Professor of English at New York University. Among her publications are The Romance of William Morris and The Earthly Paradise: Arts and Crafts by William Morris.