Jason Marc Harris's ambitious book argues that the tensions between folk metaphysics and Enlightenment values produce the literary fantastic. Demonstrating that a negotiation with folklore was central to the canon of British literature, he explicates the complicated rhetoric associated with folkloric fiction. His analysis includes a wide range of writers, including James Barrie, William Carleton, Charles Dickens, George Eliot, Sheridan Le Fanu, Neil Gunn, George MacDonald, William Sharp, Robert Louis Stevenson, and James Hogg. These authors, Harris suggests, used folklore to articulate profound cultural ambivalence towards issues of class, domesticity, education, gender, imperialism, nationalism, race, politics, religion, and metaphysics. Harris's analysis of the function of folk metaphysics in nineteenth- and early twentieth-century narratives reveals the ideological agendas of the appropriation of folklore and the artistic potential of superstition in both folkloric and literary contexts of the supernatural.
Preface; Acknowledgments; Chapter 1 An Introduction to Folklore and the Fantastic in Nineteenth-Century British Literature; Chapter 2 Victorian Literary Fairy Tales: Their Folklore and Function; Chapter 3 Victorian Fairy-Tale Fantasies: MacDonald's Fairyland and Barrie's Neverland; Chapter 4 MacDonald's; Lilith; and; Phantastes; : In Pursuit of the Soul in Fairyland; Chapter 5 James Hogg's Use of Legend: Folk Metaphysics and Narrative Authority; Chapter 6 Ghosts, "Grand Ladies," "The Gentry," and "Good Neighbors": Folkloric Representations of the Spirit World's Intersection with Class and Racial Tensions in Le Fanu; Chapter 7 Robert Louis Stevenson: Folklore and Imperialism; Chapter 8 William Carleton and William Sharp: The Celtic Renaissance and Fantastic Folklore; Chapter 9 Conclusion: Second Sight;
