Fairy-Tale Revivals in the Long Nineteenth Century

This two-volume collection includes fairy tales produced by African American, Caribbean, Irish, and other marginalized authors in the Anglophone world. These tales are a part of the expanding cartographies of the fairy-tale world during the long nineteenth-century.

While new collections devoted to emerging minority writers include some new and exciting fairy tales, this collection is particularly interested in demonstrating the historic nature of this tradition. Minority writers have been creating fairy tales alongside mainstream authors since the golden age of the fairy tales. Many of these stories have been overlooked because they are embedded in a range of literary genres, including novels, dramas, poems and lyrics. This collection mines these fairy tales and makes out-of-print or otherwise relatively inaccessible marginalized fairy tales available to a new generation of scholars.

Fairy Tales from the Margins is essential to moving fairy-tale studies beyond its current boundaries, which also limit the field’s current theories and ideologies. While some written collections are beginning to include fairy tales by historically marginalized writers, there are no collections dedicated to the fairy tales produced by marginalized writers or people of color, particularly during the nineteenth century. And there are no online collections of these distinctive fairy tales. This collection breaks new ground in the field of fairy-tale studies and will allow scholars and researchers to engage with issues that are becoming urgent in an era of rising racial tensions. This study expands upon the long-standing connections between Scottish, Welsh, Irish, African American, and Caribbean revival movements, demonstrating the ways fairy tales are incorporated into earlier forms of ethnic protest literature.

This collection is divided by tale types, to demonstrate the wide range of responses to a single tale or group of fairy tales. These divisions rely loosely on the traditional Aarne-Thompson-Uther classification system. Although these tales are primarily written by own-voice authors, a few out-of-print collections of recorded oral tales are also included to demonstrate the longevity of these tales outside mainstream traditions where print traditions are not available.