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The Literary Fairy: Celtic Folklore’S Influence On Nineteenth-Century Fiction, Joshua Dobbs

Doctoral Dissertations

There is a dissonance between the folkloric fairies and those presented by pop-cultural institutions such as Disney which has effected modern literary criticism of nineteenth-century British literature. The Disnified fairy is feminine, small, capable of flight, often with insect-like wings, and equipped with a magic wand with which she does good deeds to help others. She is largely based on fairy tales and is the embodiment of the modern conceptualization of the fairy, but she bears little, if any, resemblance to the fearsome fairies of Celtic folklore. Although nineteenth-century literature is rife with folkloric fairy references, those references are frequently …