1st Edition
The Play of Belief in Nineteenth-Century Fairy Tales and Fairy Narratives
List of Illustrations
Preface
Introduction
Chapter 1. Truth Claims in Two Cases of Nineteenth-Century Fairy Representations
Truth Claims
Chapter 2. Managing the Play of Belief within Children’s Fantasies
Chapter 3. The Two Poles of Fantastic Suggestion: Beautiful Hesitations and the Object Lesson
Chapter 4. Believing in Things
Chapter 5. Nineteenth-Century American Fairy Tales: Exceptional Fantasies and the Gigantic
Coda
Bibliography
Index
Biography
Laura White is the John E. Weaver Professor of English at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln. She has published widely on nineteenth-century subjects and is the author of Romance, Language, and Education in Jane Austen’s Novels (1988), Jane Austen’s Anglicanism (2010), and The Alice Books and the Contested Ground of the Natural World (2017) as well as the PI for Austen Said: Patterns of Diction in Jane Austen’s Novels.
“Laura White provides a compelling and prodigious study of how Victorian fairy stories and fantasies respond to and help work through the growing disenchantment with spiritual and religious belief in the nineteenth century. Her command of a vast number of literary works shows how children’s reading reckoned with the effects of modernity on spiritualism, imagination, and play.”
Eric L. Tribunella, University of Southern Mississippi
