{"id":{"repo_id":"uiuc","oai_identifier":"oai:www.ideals.illinois.edu:2142/81508"},"canonical_url":"https://search.dev.ndltd.org/etd/uiuc/oai:www.ideals.illinois.edu:2142/81508","repository":{"repo_id":"uiuc","name":"University of Illinois - Urbana-Champaign","base_url":"https://www.ideals.illinois.edu/oai-pmh"},"display":{"title":"Imaginary Forces: The Reformist Poetics of Victorian Fairyland","abstract":"Imaginary Forces identifies the liberal, recursive mid-Victorian literary fairy tale as a specifically reformist institution, rather than as the subversive or reifying genre it is frequently claimed to be. The study argues that tales used romantic recastings of traditional forms to invigorate members of the middle class with a new sense of ethical responsibility and possibility. At the same time, it describes how the tales acknowledged the difficulties of acting upon those reformed identifications and rejected their most subversive implications. The dissertation begins with an analysis of George MacDonald's fairy tale theory and then proceeds through close rhetorical analyses of George MacDonald's Phantastes (1858), Charles Kingsley's The Water-Babies (1863), Jean Ingelow's Mopsa the Fairy (1869), and Lewis Carroll's Alice's Adventures in Wonderland (1865).","abstract_html":"Imaginary Forces identifies the liberal, recursive mid-Victorian literary fairy tale as a specifically reformist institution, rather than as the subversive or reifying genre it is frequently claimed to be. The study argues that tales used romantic recastings of traditional forms to invigorate members of the middle class with a new sense of ethical responsibility and possibility. At the same time, it describes how the tales acknowledged the difficulties of acting upon those reformed identifications and rejected their most subversive implications. 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