Folklore and the Fantastic in Nineteenth-Century British Fiction

Jason Marc Harris's ambitious book argues that the tensions between folk metaphysics and Enlightenment values produce the literary fantastic. Demonstrating that a negotiation with folklore was central to the canon of British literature, he explicates the complicated rhetoric associated with folkloric fiction. His analysis includes a wide range of writers, including James Barrie, William Carleton, Charles Dickens, George Eliot, Sheridan Le Fanu, Neil Gunn, George MacDonald, William Sharp, Robert Louis Stevenson, and James Hogg. These authors, Harris suggests, used folklore to articulate profound cultural ambivalence towards issues of class, domesticity, education, gender, imperialism, nationalism, race, politics, religion, and metaphysics. Harris's analysis of the function of folk metaphysics in nineteenth- and early twentieth-century narratives reveals the ideological agendas of the appropriation of folklore and the artistic potential of superstition in both folkloric and literary contexts of the supernatural.

Dr Jason Marc Harris is an assistant professor in the Dept. of Humanities and Communications at the Florida Institute of Technology. He is the coauthor (with Birke Duncan) of a folklore study, The Troll Tale and Other Scary Stories (2001). Besides writing various articles about the interaction between folklore and literature, he recently provided an introduction to Robert Louis Stevenson's The Master of Ballantrae for the Barnes and Noble Library of Essential Reading Series (2006).