There are fairy tales that surprise, destabilise, or even shock us: these are uncanny fairy tales that manipulate familiar stories in creative and bewildering ways in order to express new meanings. This work analyses these tales, basing its approach on a reformulation of Freud’s concept of the uncanny. Through a cognitive outlook the employed theoretical framework provides new perspectives on the study of experimental literary fairy tales. Considering English-language literature, complex and unsettling reinterpretations of the fairy-tale discourse began to appear during the Victorian Age, later resurfacing as a postmodern trend. This research individuates uncanny-related narrative techniques and cognitive responses as means to decodify and explore these tales, and as ways to discover unseen connections between Victorian and postmodern texts. The new theorisation of the uncanny is linked with three subconcepts: mirror, hybridity, and wonder, which function as tools to describe and investigate the cognitive and emotional entanglements characterising enigmatic and disorienting fairy tales.
Introduction
Chapter 1
The Shell in the Woods: Questioning the “Unnatural” through Uncanny Fairy Tales’ Mirrors, Wonder, and Hybridity
1.1 Theoretical Overview: The Unnatural versus the Uncanny
1.2 Uncanny Wonderlands
1.3 “All mirrors are magic mirrors”
1.4 Hybrid Characters, Genre, Expression
1.5 Angela Carter’s Shell
Chapter 2
Halls of Mirrors: Uncanny Glassworlds in the Castles of the Mind
2.1 Si se non noverit: The Danger in the Mirror
2.2 “The mirror has lifted it out of the region of fact into the realm of art”: Fire and Ice and Mirrors’ Paradoxical Potential
2.3 Metamorphic Cinderellas: Glass and the Grotesque
Chapter 3
Fairy Brides, Floating Princesses, Jabberwocks: Hybrid Uncanniness and Fairyland Pastiches
3.1 Scientific Folk Tales, Magic Realities, Comedic Sexual Tragedies: Uncanny Fairy Tales and Their Hybrid Genres
3.2 Fairy Brides, Mermaids, Beastly Princes: Hybrid Characters
3.3 “ ‘Twas brillig, and the slithy toves /Did gyre and gimble in the wabe”: Hybrid Expression and Its Uncanny Effects
Chapter 4
Uncanny Wonders: Puzzling Lands, Dragons, and Dreams
4.1 Wonderlands: Imaginary Landscapes Escaping Fixed Interpretations
4.2 “I will try to be wonderful; but I cannot promise first-rate wonders”: Troubling and Subversive Wonders
4.3 “That gentle light of evening that is Wonder’s native haunt”: Wonder, Dreams, and Childhood
Conclusion
Biography
Francesca Arnavas is a cognitive narratologist and a specialist in Victorian and fantasy literature. She received her PhD in English and Related Literature from the University of York, UK, in 2018. She now works as a Research Fellow and Lecturer in Comparative Literature and Literary Theory at the University of Tartu, Estonia, within the research group Narrative, Culture, and Cognition. She has researched and published on Victorian literature (especially Lewis Carroll), cognitive narratology, and literary Victorian and postmodern fairy tales. Her first monograph was published by De Gruyter (2021), within the Narratologia series.
