Folklore and the Fantastic in Nineteenth-Century British Fiction, the published book result of Jason Marc Harris’s PhD dissertation, examines the tensions between folk narratives, fairy tales, and nineteenth-century literature of the fantastic. In his own words: “How nineteenth century writers imitate, revise, and transform preternatural folkloric material into narratives of the literary fantastic is the substantive focus of this book” (1).
It is in the interactions and through the dynamic tensions between supernatural folk narratives and literary realism that Harris argues nineteenth-century literary fantastic is produced and that these tensions are not easily or ever fully resolved within the texts. Rather, the differing perspectives of folk magic and rational science are in conversation in these texts. Harris employs Tzvetan Todorov’s definition of the fantastic as literature of hesitation between the poles of the supernatural explained as the uncanny and the unquestioned magic of the marvelous fairy tale. Harris shows that, although specific texts occasionally privilege one over the other, they are fantastic precisely because they create hesitation as to the value and reality of the supernatural as well as the value of rationalism. The literary fantastic is the product of the negotiations between these two discourses and could not exist without both.
Harris’s statement of the text’s purpose is a concise encapsulation of his argument: “This book shows how the tension between folk metaphysics and rationalism produces the literary fantastic, and the analysis demonstrates that narrative and ideological negotiation with folklore was central to the canon, as well as popular in the margins of British literature. In supernatural folkloric literature, the demands of aesthetics, class, morality, superstition and skepticism compete for authority--producing a dynamic rhetoric of superstition characterized by competing cultural voices and introducing moments of interpretative hesitation. This rhetoric of superstition that these authors engage serves as both a communicative tool and a system of cultural interrogation that exerts its own power over these literary works” (viii). All of the succeeding chapters develop this statement of purpose consistently and with ample evidential support.
The concept of folk metaphysics is his own and represents the “folkloric assumptions about how the supernatural engages the material world” (viii). His study considers selected texts to discuss the ways in which folk metaphysics is transformed when articulated within prose narrative. In addition, Harris introduces the concept of the metaphysical contact zone which combines his folk metaphysics and Mary Louise Pratt’s “contact zones” and the observation that tensions between civilization and nature occur at social, geographical, national, and racial borders, and that the literary fantastic of the nineteenth-century articulates these borderlands as spaces of constant struggle.
The framing chapters of the volume:--the preface; the introductory chapter, “An Introduction to Folklore and the Fantastic in Nineteenth-Century British Literature”; chapter 2, “Victorian Literary Fairy Tales: Their Folklore and Function”; and the conclusion, “Second Site”--are the strongest chapters in the collection. The introduction provides a succinct and lucid discussion of the ways in which folkloristics and literary criticism can and do work together, and provides a brief overview of the terminology and of the relevant developments in the fields as well as concise discussions of the various genres of fantasy, the fantastic, Gothic, fairy tale, and legend (17-28). The first two chapters in particular will be an informative addition to courses for students of folklore who may not be familiar with the literary fantastic as well as for students of literature not versed in the terms and theories of folkloristics.
The middle chapters focus upon particular authors: George MacDonald, J.M. Barrie, James Hogg, Sheridan Le Fanu, Robert Louis Stevenson, William Carleton, and William Sharp, respectively. These chapters contextualize the authors and texts Harris discusses within the Victorian period and then move into close readings that provide detailed discussions of how folk metaphysics is essential to an understanding of the development of British fantastic fiction. These chapters evaluate the ways particular authors use specific rhetorical devices to enact the tensions between scientific rationalism and folk metaphysics. The meticulous detection of multiple motifs and tale types within the texts, the contextualization, and the readings are interesting and add to scholarship on these authors and texts in relation to folk narratives and as examples of the complexities of nineteenth-century British fiction as a whole.
Harris’s analysis of his chosen texts shows the deep ambivalence of the Victorian mind toward both reason and superstition, nation, ethnicity, and class distinctions. And his conclusion makes connections between the imperialist world of Victorian Britain and contemporary perceived “threats” to tradition and stable class, racial, and national distinctions in the twenty-first-century multicultural world. I would have liked to have seen more reflection about the ambivalence of our own time as it is worked through dominant poststructuralist/postmodern theorization which privileges indeterminacy, collations, fragmentation, and interdiciplinarity and which clearly have fed Harris’s own recognition of the border crossings and boundary shifts that attention to folk narratives of the supernatural bring to an examination of literary fiction.
Folklore and the Fantastic in Nineteenth-Century British Fiction is a welcome addition to current discussions and research about the hybridity of the literary fantastic and its intersections with folk narratives of the supernatural and fairy tales.
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[Review length: 853 words • Review posted on October 8, 2008]