Young, Le Fanu and Living Fairy Gothic

Marvels & Tales: Journal of Fairy-Tale Studies, Vol. 21, No. 1, 2007

This research traces the journey of a single fairy tale from its origins in Parisian salons three hundred years ago to an oral version told from memory by a French Missourian miner in 1934. Mme d’Aulnoy’s “Finette Cendron” has a peculiar history because it combines the plots of two tale types, “Le Petit Poucet” (“Little Thumbling,” ATU 327) and “Cendrillon” (“Cinderella,” ATU 510).

Irish Gothics, 2014

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2021

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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.

University of Hertfordshire, 8‒10 April 2021 As Prof. Dale Townsend has observed, the concept of the Gothic has had an association with fairies from its inception; even before Walpole’s 1764 Castle of Otranto (considered the first Gothic novel), eighteenth-century poetics talked of ‘the fairy kind of writing’ which, for Addison, ‘raise a pleasing kind of Horrour in the Mind of the Reader’ and ‘and favour those secret Terrours and Apprehensions to which the Mind of Man is naturally subject’. Johnson, in his Preface to Shakespeare (1765), talks of ‘the loves of Theseus and Hippolyta combined with the Gothic mythology of fairies’. ‘Horror’ and ‘terror’ are key terms of affect in Gothic criticism; Townsend urges us, however, to move away from this dichotomy. While we are certainly interested in the darker aspects of fairies and the fear they may induce, this conference also welcomes attention to that aspect of Gothic that invokes wonder and enchantment.

Marvels & Tales, 2008

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.

Genealogisches Wissen in Mittelalter und Früher Neuzeit: Konstruktion - Darstellung - Rezeption, 2023

Although popular culture, particularlyinthe wakeofDisney,has convinced us that fairies are, by and large,harmless and benign creatures workingfor human wishfulfilment,the fairies of history werequite different from their modern forebears. Historically, fairies have been viewed in avariety of ways rangingfrom the downright sinisterand demonic to the liminal, the inscrutable, and the unknowable.As asubsetofthe ambiguous supernatural, fairies have elicited significant theological and socioculturald iscomfort,s ometimes denigrated and condemned as handmaidens of their more explicitlydiabolical counterpart,the witch and occasionallydismissed as the annoying vestigeso fa ni gnorant and superstitiousp ast of folkloric fantasy¹.I nt he sixteenth and seventeenthc enturies,h owever,f airies were also persistentlye mployed in works of literary fiction, appearing both in the works of printed texts as well as in dramatic performance. In tandem with their ontological ambivalencea nd hermeneutic heterogeneity, fairies were subject to modes of conceptualisation that werea sd iverse, shape-shifting,a nd oscillatory as their varieties of literary treatment.Insuch acase, reconstructing amonolithic and undifferentiated tradition of fairy in Tudor England is not onlyafallacious undertaking but also, accordingt oMatthew Woodcock, ultimatelyboth unnecessary and futile. Instead, Woodcock encourages 'reading' fairiesa sd efinitive textual constructs, moving away from focusing on the essentialist attributes of fairies themselvest o an analysis of "the rhetorical or formal role of fairy within [the] process of representation" by taking into account "the ways in which fairies are represented, described, depicted, or staged within texts"². One of theu ses to which fairies werep ut in literary works of the sixteenth century was for the political legitimation of the ruling monarchy in England as parallels wered rawn between fairy genealogiesa nd royal lineage, an associative link relying upon the cultural cachet of fairiesw ithint he English national imaginary.This paper will explore this link through atheoretical and historical lens, applying Stephen Greenblatt'st heory of 'self-fashioning' to posit ar ationale for understanding and deconstructing the network of associations between fairy ancestry,imperial ambition, and specular representation and offering an historical survey of connections between fairylore and monarchyi nt he legends of Arthur 1 RichardF .Green, Elf Queens and Holy Friars.F airy Beliefs and the Medieval Church, Philadelphia 2016 (The Middle Ages Series). 2 Matthew Woodcock, Fairy in The Faerie Queene. Renaissance Elf-Fashioninga nd Elizabethan Myth-Making,A ldershot/Burlington, VT 2004,p .9. Open Access. ©2 023 bei den Autorinnen und Autoren,p ubliziert von De Gruyter. Dieses Werk ist lizenziert untere iner CreativeC ommons Namensnennung 4.0 International Lizenz.

Marvels & Tales, 2005