Strange and Secret Peoples : Fairies and Victorian Consciousness: Fairies and Victorian ConsciousnessTeeming 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. |
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Strange and Secret Peoples: Fairies and Victorian Consciousness Carole G. Silver Limited preview - 2000 |
Strange and Secret Peoples: Fairies and Victorian Consciousness Carole G. Silver Limited preview - 2000 |
Strange and Secret Peoples: Fairies and Victorian Consciousness Carole G. Silver Limited preview - 1999 |
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abducted actual Andrew Lang argued Arthur banshee bean-nigh beautiful belief British Isles Celtic century changeling Cottingley fairy creatures cultural dancing dead death demonic depicted described Doyle Doyle's elementals elfin elves England English euhemerist Evans-Wentz evolution fairy bride fairy faith fairy lore fairy paintings Fairy Tales fairyland fantasy Farewell female fairies fiction figures folklore folklorists Fuseli George glaistig gnomes goblins grotesque Henry Fuseli Ireland Irish John Joseph Noel Paton Lady Leadbeater Legends Little Goblin London MacRitchie male marriage mermaid mortal Mythology nature Nutt Oberon occult occultists origins ostensibly photographs poem popular preternatural primitive Puck Pygmies race racial Richard Dadd romantic savage scientific Scotland Scottish seen selkie sexual shee sidhe Society species spirits story Strange and Secret suggested supernatural dwarfs swan maidens tale theory thought tion Titania traditional tribes Undine Victorian Victorian folklorists vols Welsh wife William witches woman women Yeats York