Uncanny Fairy Tales

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.

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 Vs the Uncanny

1.2 Uncanny Wonderlands

1.3 “All mirrors are magic mirrors”

1.4 Hybrid Characters, Genre, Language

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 Folktales, 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