Fairy Tales of London: British Urban Fantasy, 1840 to the Present

Description

Finalist for the 2022 Mythopoeic Scholarship Award for Myth and Fantasy Studies From the time of Charles Dickens, the imaginative power of the city of London has frequently inspired writers to their most creative flights of fantasy. Charting a new history of London fantasy writing from the Victorian era to the 21st century, Fairy Tales of London explores a powerful tradition of urban fantasy distinct from the rural tales of writers such as J.R.R. Tolkien. Hadas Elber-Aviram traces this urban tradition from Dickens, through the scientific romances of H.G. Wells, the anti-fantasies of George Orwell and Mervyn Peake to contemporary science fiction and fantasy writers such as Michael Moorcock, Neil Gaiman and China Mieville.

Hadas Elber-Aviram is Adjunct Assistant Professor at the University of Notre Dame, London, UK.

Insightful ... Fairy Tales of London is an lucid piece of detective work in the field of literary genre. * Archives: The Journal of the British Records Association * Elber-Aviram leads readers through a sustained examination of almost two centuries of the urban fantasy tradition, grounding her analysis in the Victorian era and hearkening back to Dickens's work in every chapter. This book will certainly be of interest to scholars of both rural and urban fantasy fiction, and Victorian periodical scholars will perhaps be inspired to consider rural and urban fantasy traditions in periodicals. * Victorian Periodicals Review * For scholars focusing on considerations of place and urban fantasy, and London in particular, this monograph represents a crucial text for charting the origins and approaches within the genre, whilst also wholeheartedly championing the potentiality of urban fantasy. * Foundation: The International Review of Science Fiction * This ambitious and important book advances a persuasive new reading of 19th and 20th-century British Fantasy writing, exploring the dynamic between a tradition of Rural Imagination, typified by writers like Ruskin, MacDonald, Tolkien and C S Lewis and one of Urban Fantasy typified by Dickens, Wells, Orwell, Peake and China Mieville. It marks an important intervention into the on-going critical debate about writing of the fantastic. -- Adam Roberts, Professor of Nineteenth-Century Literature, Royal Holloway, University of London, UK