Folklore and the Fantastic in Nineteenth-Century British Fiction

Folklore and the Fantastic in Nineteenth-Century British Fiction. By Jason Marc Harris. (Hampshire, England: Ashgate, 2008. Pp. xii + 235, contents, preface, acknowledgements, footnotes, bibliography, index, $99.95 cloth.)Written for discerning academics familiar with folklore scholarship, Jason Marc Harris' Folklore and the Fantastic in Nineteenth-Century British Fiction offers a useful model for investigating folklore's role in literature, while providing commentary that justifies its presence in British texts of the era. The book is organized into nine chapters, including an insightful introduction that explains some of the basic concepts of folklore analysis and establishes the foundation of the author's study. Citing eminent scholars in the field, Harris establishes credibility rather quickly and the initial literature selected supports this momentum. Indeed, the first book mentioned is Wilkie Collins' The Woman in White, a supernatural mystery of great popularity and significance to the Victorians. Also mentioned are the Grimms, Sir Walter Scott, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, and Elizabeth Gaskell.Harris successfully strives to include the audience in his first chapter by defining recognized folklore terms (motifs, tale-types, legend, marchen, etc.) as well as his own terminology such as metaphysics in order to establish a theoretical strucuire for die scholarship that follows. This effort is appreciated, as many scholars of literature may not be entirely familiar with these idiosyncratic definitions.Harris also strategically incorporates headings. With emphasis through bold or italicized fonts, Harris makes clear distinctions between categories and subjects with headings. He concludes the chapter with an eye towards die remainder of the book with sections on ideologies and his own argument: what emerges [out of the duality between the cultural elite and the folk achieved by die incorporation of folklore into literature] is a self-conscious rhetoric containing both skepticism and superstition that displays die mind at odds, or rather in conflicted conversation with itself (35). This type of summary passage concluding each chapter is one of the many strengths of the book.Chapter Two, Victorian Literary Fairy Tales: Their Folklore and Function, is an enjoyable and insightful read, fueled heavily by previous scholarship. Harris is certainly not afraid to question some of that analysis - die continuation of which becomes a bit of a problem as the pages turn. He also does a superb job at distinguishing between folk fairy tales and literary fairy tales, creating a solid basis for future analysis, and proceeds to include sections on socio-economics, gender, didacticism, and hybridization. Some of the audiors discussed here are Oscar Wilde and Edith Nesbit, and Ford Maddox Ford - rather interesting and unexpected selections.In Harris' tfiird chapter on James Barrie and George MacDonald, the book takes a decisive turn. …

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