May be of interest to some.

Best,
Sabina

Sabina Magliocco
Professor and Chair
Department of Anthropology
California State University - Northridge
18111 Nordhoff St.
Northridge, CA  91330-8244
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Subject: [JFRR] Folklore and the Fantastic in Nineteenth-Century British Fiction (Harris, Jason Marc)

Folklore and the Fantastic in Nineteenth-Century British Fiction. By
Jason Marc Harris. 2008. Burlington: Ashgate Publishing. 248 pages.
ISBN: 0754657663 (hard cover).

Reviewed by Jennifer Orme, University of Hawai'i at M?noa
([log in to unmask]).

[Word count: 853 words]

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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