Imaginary Forces: The Reformist Poetics of Victorian Fairyland
Searsmith, Kelly Lin
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https://hdl.handle.net/2142/81508
Description
Title
Imaginary Forces: The Reformist Poetics of Victorian Fairyland
Author(s)
Searsmith, Kelly Lin
Issue Date
1999
Doctoral Committee Chair(s)
Anderson, Amanda
Department of Study
English
Discipline
English
Degree Granting Institution
University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
Degree Name
Ph.D.
Degree Level
Dissertation
Keyword(s)
Literature, English
Language
eng
Abstract
Imaginary Forces identifies the liberal, recursive mid-Victorian literary fairy tale as a specifically reformist institution, rather than as the subversive or reifying genre it is frequently claimed to be. The study argues that tales used romantic recastings of traditional forms to invigorate members of the middle class with a new sense of ethical responsibility and possibility. At the same time, it describes how the tales acknowledged the difficulties of acting upon those reformed identifications and rejected their most subversive implications. The dissertation begins with an analysis of George MacDonald's fairy tale theory and then proceeds through close rhetorical analyses of George MacDonald's Phantastes (1858), Charles Kingsley's The Water-Babies (1863), Jean Ingelow's Mopsa the Fairy (1869), and Lewis Carroll's Alice's Adventures in Wonderland (1865).
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