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The Literary Fairy: Celtic Folklore’S Influence On Nineteenth-Century Fiction, Joshua Dobbs
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 …
Innocent Artists: Creativity And Growing Up In Literatures Of Maturation, 1850-1920, Whitney Elaine Jones
Innocent Artists: Creativity And Growing Up In Literatures Of Maturation, 1850-1920, Whitney Elaine Jones
Doctoral Dissertations
This project combines three subgenres of the novel—children’s literature, the Bildungsroman, and the Künstlerroman—under a new comprehensive category I term “literatures of maturation,” or texts that share a concern with the inner and outer formation of the individual, with growing up, and with childhood. By reading British literatures of maturation from both the Victorian and modern eras (that is, within the time frame of the Golden Age of children’s literature), I reveal that, creativity disrupts literary plots of growth and development, and that social integration and artistic maturation battle for dominance in the child’s journey to adulthood, resulting …