Posted by: tuna-poyrazoglu

Victorian writers often claimed that the press was killing the fairy tale. A new book funded by the AHRC proves that the opposite was true. Instead of killing the fairy tale it actually ensured the genre's popularity.

Newspapers and monthlies brought literary fairy tales and folklore to the first mass readerships. The nineteenth century saw major developments in the fairy tale as a popular genre; it also witnessed dramatic changes in the cost and accessibility of print, resulting in an explosion of newspapers and magazines. Dr Caroline Sumpter's book, ‘The Victorian Press and the Fairy Tale’, completed during her AHRC Research Leave, is the first study to focus on that dynamic relationship.

An important aim of Caroline’s book is to explore the ingenious political uses of the fairy tale: in debates over socialism, evolution and race, and in the context of women's rights, decadence and gay culture. Whether they were used to grapple with the implications of Darwinism, to imagine a socialist utopia, or to engage with new aesthetic movements and strategies, fairy tales played a central role in Victorian cultural debates. Used to speak to both children and adults, and to working- as well as middle-class audiences, fairy tales were reclaimed by a surprisingly diverse range of interest groups.

Exploring penny weeklies, adult and children's monthlies, little magazines and the labour press, this innovative study is the first to combine media and fairy-tale history. Drawing on archives and library holdings in Belfast, Leeds, Sheffield and London, and on full text electronic periodical resources such as British Newspapers Online and British Periodicals, Caroline has brought reading communities back into focus.

The book offers new insights into the popularisation of folklore and comparative science, and also recovers neglected visual material. From the fantasies of Charles Kingsley, George MacDonald and J. H. Ewing to the writings of Keir Hardie, Laurence Housman and W. B. Yeats, Caroline reveals that the fairy tale was intimately shaped by the press, and that both were at the heart of nineteenth-century culture.

Image: © istockphoto/hypergon


Source: http://www.ahrc.ac.uk

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