Evans Wentz Fairy Article.pdf

This article was published by Evans Wentz in the Daily News for Christmas 1913. Here he writes about the imagination of children in a utilitarian and urban age and the importance of belief in fairies.

PhD Thesis, 2020

This thesis charts the shift in the scholarly treatment of fairies within the work of the Folklore Society (FLS) and its members, from its foundation in 1878 until World War Two. During this period the fairies' cultural position shifted from being a subject of intense interest in Victorian adult art and literature to becoming a whimsical being which dominated children's fairy-tale illustrations. During this era the FLS itself also experienced a waning cultural influence. A prominent Society before 1900, the FLS increasingly dwindled as folklore failed to gain a foothold in universities, key founding members died and the Society faced financial pressures. Concurrently folklore scholars became disinterested in children's book fairies. Both the FLS and fairies experienced a correlating, and somewhat mutually causal, decline in cultural prestige by the early twentieth century. The FLS's fairy scholarship provides the perfect space for exploring the changing cultural position of fairies and folkloristics in Britain during this era.

Introduce the medieval phenomenon of what “Fairy” is/was; shared phenomenon shaped ideas and practices of medieval peoples. Show of the literature that was studied, reviewed, and manipulated to support the thesis subject. Explain methodological approach of the research design. Discuss the points of the thesis; being origins, the phenomenon, and realms. Explain what limitation were encountered in construing a research design with its basis in speculative and scholarly works concerning the period. A conclusion based on findings in known or collected literature, material discovery, methodological approach, and personal normative opinion based on educated and passionate research for a subject that is very close to the treatise author.

The Cottingley Fairy Photographs: New Approaches to Fairies, Fakes and Folklore, 2024

The understanding of fairies in England that would have existed, particularly among children, in the early 20th century was shaped by a confluence of cultural factors which pervaded the late 19th and early 20th century and which reshaped the popular idea of fairies away from potentially malevolent, often human-sized beings and into twee butterfly winged sprites. This transformation was mainly influenced by Theosophy, Victorian popular ideas about fairies, and the early Edwardian romanticism of both childhood and the fairies which came to represent it. This reshaped belief, particularly popular among children, influenced not only the Cottingley photos but also their reception and the wider narrative around them which played into the expectations of the time.

ELCOME TO MYTHCON 44, here in East Lansing, Michigan. Let me start by thanking the Mythopoeic Society and the Council of Stewards for inviting me, and Marion Van Loo and the Mythcon Committee for arranging the details, and Leslie Donovan for working out the programming. I'd also like to welcome Franny Billingsley, our writer Guest of Honor. Our theme for this year's conference is ‚Green and Growing: The Land and Its Inhabitants.‛ A look at the programming for this conference shows many different ways of approaching this theme, and in particular in approaching the complex relationship between a land (that is, any land), the beings that live in that land, and the beings that potentially live in the minds of the inhabitants of that land. That may sound confusing, but let me explain further. In general, I wish today to speak of that intersection of these varied branches. This area of intersection can be called Faerie or fairyland, as it exists in a kind of boundary world between the land and its inhabitants, and the fairies themselves may be seen as the beings that potentially live in the land, or in the mind of the land's inhabitants.

Gramayre, 2022

Gramarye 22.2 OGOM Special Journal Issue on Fairies, developed from OGOM Gothic Fairies Conference

An article written for Fortean Times (Jan 2024) to introduce Fairy Census 2. These were proofs and there may be a couple of typos.

Children's Literature Association Quarterly, 2019