According to Binding, in addition to Andersen's love for the history of his native land, especially his affinity for Denmark's Golden Age, Andersen also revered the larger European literary ...tradition. ...Andersen's journal entry, which "sees the war in less generic and more painfully individual terms" (283), dwells on the senseless loss of life. Toni Thibodeaux Toni Thibodeaux is currently teaching freshman composition as a graduate assistant at Middle Tennessee State University in Murfreesboro, TN, and formerly served as a collaborative peer tutor in the University Writing Center.Her current research interests include children's literature, fairy tales, and Robert Louis Stevenson.
The oddities and eccentricities of Victorian Oxford with its mix of the old and the new, where Carroll would attend school at Christ Church and live out the rest of his days as a mathematics ...professor, provide a proper context for the creation of dream worlds. Some of the sights in the future Wonderland, for instance, pale in comparison to the habits of the real-life William Buckland, the “celebrated zoophagist,” who was convinced that it was his God-given obligation to “munch his way through the entire animal kingdom” (61). ...in large part, Douglas-Fairhurst’s success with The Story of Alice lies in his ability to put Carroll in the context of his own age. ...as Douglas-Fairhurst records, after a conflict with a certain Mrs. Owen whose seventeen-year-old daughter he kissed and then suggested to her mother that he might take nude pictures of her, circumstances became so difficult for him that he stopped taking photographs altogether.
Robert Louis Stevenson was an enthusiastic experimenter in a variety of genres who viewed the writer's role as both that of an entertainer of his readers and as a provocateur regarding the moral and ...ethical. Marchen, patterned on old German folktales, allowed him to amuse his audience and to bring to their attention important issues of his day and how they impacted the cultures in which the stories were situated. While he directed that three of his stories be published together as marchen, his publisher ignored his instructions. The two Polynesian marchen were published with another Polynesian story that he insisted did not belong with the marchen. His Icelandic marchen, an adaptation of a saga, was not even published during his lifetime. This thesis examines the three stories that Stevenson intended to be published together in one volume of marchen: "The Bottle Imp," "The Isle of Voices," and "The Waif Woman." It claims that these stories, one original and two retellings, should be considered as marchen based on the author's stated intention and the generic elements of the stories. The study arose, in fact, from questions about critical reluctance to treat Stevenson's three marchen in terms of his insistence on their generic character and the lack of scholarship examining these stories in terms of fairy tale adaptation. He wrote the works that this study analyzes while he was living in Hawaii during the late nineteenth century, soon before he settled permanently in Polynesia, specifically Samoa, a region that he had come to love. Two of these tales, "The Bottle Imp" and "The Isle of Voices," reflect his fascination with Polynesian culture and his strong interest in the impact of colonialism and Christianity on native populations. In these two stories, Stevenson explores nineteenth-century Polynesian society precisely in terms of the effects of the meeting of traditional beliefs and practices with European colonialism and Christianity. The third story, "The Waif Woman," is set in medieval Iceland during the time when Christianity was established there. Based on a saga translated and published by William Morris and Eirikr Magnusson during the time that Stevenson was writing, Stevenson adapts one episode of the saga, transforming its epic narrative into a domestic folktale that features both the magic and supernatural aspects of Icelandic tradition alongside Christian practices. Employing studies of fairy and folk tales by the Grimms, Propp, Tolkien, Zipes and other theorists of fantasy genres, this study analyzes the features of marchen that made the genre so appealing to Stevenson and suitable to his purposes. Specifically, the genre features elements of folk and fairy tale, allowing Stevenson to write engaging stories that also record vanishing folk ways. It features the fantastic, which appears in Stevenson's stories as elements of traditional beliefs that he sought to record. Furthermore, marchen employ elements of legends by situating stories in particular cultural times and places, a feature through which Stevenson documented disappearing traditions in Polynesian culture and explored Icelandic heritage that Scotland inherited. This study looks at how Stevenson's adaptation of previously existing tales and his subversion of generic elements critique social, economic, and political structures resulting from invasion and colonialism, a historical process that he recognized as pervasive in terms of the formation of national identities. Finally, the marchen genre enabled Stevenson to develop his observations that all humans are capable of good and evil—colonists, natives, missionaries, those in power, and those who are ruled. His marchen demonstrate that all human-constructed systems, whether meant for harm or help, are capable of both good and evil. The world of Stevenson's marchen is thus a morally ambiguous place where situations and people, like genres and history, do not fit neatly into categories. The study concludes that Stevenson's insistence that his stories be read as marchen should be taken seriously by scholars since to do so elucidates the complex cultural work they perform.
Richmond sets the stage in the first chapter by providing the social, political, cultural, and religious context of the era in which Spenser penned The Faerie Queene. Because traditional medieval ...romance contains a strongly Catholic ethos, Spenser's task in the post-Reformation sixteenth century was to transform classic Catholic medieval romance into a uniquely Protestant invention using "moral and religious allegory" (6). ...Richmond sardonically explains that in the case of Andrew Lang's The Red Romance Book of 1905, written primarily by his wife Leonora, Henry J. Ford's illustrations were "more memorable than her words" (128).
