Fairy Tales, Natural History and Victorian Culture

by Talairach-Vielmas, Laurence

• ISBN13: 9781137342393
• ISBN10: 1137342390
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 2014-05-07
• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan

Summary

Fairy Tales, Natural History and Victorian Culture deals with the way in which natural history was connected to the world of fairies and highlights how shifts in the understanding of natural history, especially after 1859, had a significant impact on fairy stories and Victorian experiments with the literary fairy tale. By exploring the interaction between scientific and literary fields, this book shows the ways in which natural knowledge was shaped and disseminated in Victorian culture and illuminates cultural practices through which new representations of nature and the natural world were popularised. This original approach to Victorian culture, blending studies of fictional and non-fictional narratives, examines therefore a part of the history of the mediation of knowledge about nature in the Victorian period and points out how the mediation of this new knowledge contributed to the Victorians' awareness of environmental issues.

Author Biography

Laurence Talairach-Vielmas is Professor of English at the University of Toulouse, France, and Associate Researcher at the Centre Alexandre Koyré in Paris. Her research specializes on the relations between literature and science. She is the author of Wilkie Collins, Medicine and the Gothic (2009) and Moulding the Female Body in Victorian Fairy Tales and Sensation Novels (2007).

Table of Contents

Acknowledgements
Introduction
1. From The Wonders of Nature to the Wonders of Evolution: Charles Kingsley's Nursery Fairies
2. 'How Are You To Enter The Fairy-Land of Science?': The Wonders of The Natural World in Arabella Buckley's Popular Science Works For Children
3. The Mechanization of Feelings: Mary de Morgan's Toy Princess
4. Nature Under Glass: Victorian Cinderellas, Magic and Metamorphosis
5. Nature Exposed: Charting the Wild Body in Little Red Riding Hood
6. Nature and the Natural World in Mary Louisa Molesworth's Christmas-Tree Land
7. Edith Nesbit's Fairies and Freaks of Nature: Environmental Consciousness in Five Children and It
Epilogue
Index