The Victorian Press and the Fairy Tale (Palgrave Studies in Nineteenth-Century Writing and Culture) [Hardcover]

Caroline E. Sumpter (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: October 14, 2008 | Series: Palgrave Studies in Nineteenth-Century Writing and Culture

Shortlisted for the 2011 Mythopoeic Scholarship Award for Myth and Fantasy Studies

 

Victorian writers often claimed that the press was killing the fairy tale. In fact, it ensured the genre's popularity, bringing literary tales and folklore to the first mass readerships. Exploring penny weeklies, adult and children's monthlies, little magazines and the labour press, this innovative study is the first to combine media and fairy tale history. Bringing reading communities back into focus, Sumpter explores ingenious political uses of the fairy tale: in debates over socialism, evolution and race, and in the context of women's rights, decadence and gay culture. The book offers new insights into the popularisation of folklore and comparative science, and also recovers neglected visual material. From the fantasies of Kingsley, MacDonald and J. H. Ewing to the writings of Keir Hardie, Laurence Housman and Yeats, Sumpter reveals that the fairy tale was intimately shaped by the press, and that both were at the heart of nineteenth-century culture.

Editorial Reviews

Review

"The Victorian Press and the Fairy Tale fills a major gap in the study of the literary fairy tale, and it fills the gap extremely well. Sumpter has a profound understanding and comprehensive knowledge of the periodical fairy tales published in the latter part of the nineteenth century, and she provides interesting analyses of the tales as well as the social history behind them and the authors engaged in writing and editing these unusual narratives. Her work is definitely unique and will make a major contribution to our knowledge about the social history of the fairy tale." - Professor Jack Zipes, University of Minnesota
 
"The Victorian Press and the Fairy Tale offers an engaging, carefully researched, and lucidly written history of the relationship between the Victorian popular press, the fairy tale, and a range of publications for both children and adults - some quite surprising - that engaged this supple genre in the nineteenth century." - Troy Boone, Nineteenth-Century Literature
 
"Sumpter's book is a clear, convincingly argued, and highly documented interdisciplinary study - undoubtedly an original and rich contribution to the field of Victorian studies that will prove invaluable to students and scholars who are interested in the Victorian period." - Laurence Talairach-Vielmas, Marvels and Tales
 
"[Sumpter's] book should draw the attention of those with interests in topics such as education, marriage and sexuality, with which the more overt issues of labor and urbanization were intimately connected...this book makes signal reading for specialists in English Literature in Transition fields." - Benjamin J. Fisher, English Literature in Transition
 
"Caroline Sumpter's monograph The Victorian Press and The Fairy Tale is a fresh and inspiring example of the fruitful combination of the pespectives of folklore studies, media history and literary history." - Kirsti Salmi-Niklander, Society for the History of Authorship, Reading & Publishing
 
"Sumpter's book is impressive both in its overarching scope and in its focused readings of 1860s and 1890s periodicals."- Beth Palmer, Victorian Periodicals Review
 
"Caroline Sumpter's The Victorian Press and the Fairy Tale is a fresh and inspiring example of the fruitful combination of the perspectives of folklore studies, media history and literary history." - Kirsti Salmi-Niklander, SHARP News
 
"In this exacting and compact study, Caroline Sumpter examines how nineteenth-century periodicals "reinvented" the fairy tale and, in the process, assured it a permanent role in Victorian culture... [it] should be commended not only for addressing a previous lacuna in Victorian studies, but also, and perhaps, more importantly, for the profitable connections it makes to other contemporaneous topics of study such as emergent scientific theories, labor politics, gender, and nationalism." - Joanna Shawn Brigid O'Leary, Nineteenth-Century Gender Studies

About the Author

CAROLINE SUMPTER is Lecturer in English at Queen's University, Belfast, UK.

Product Details

• Hardcover: 266 pages
• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan (October 14, 2008)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0230518052
• ISBN-13: 978-0230518056
• Product Dimensions: 8.6 x 5.4 x 0.9 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #2,933,306 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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