This chapter traces the emergence of the fairy tale as a generically defined form in Britain in the course of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, and argues that this process of generic consolidation was the product of a series of fruitful creative and commercial interchanges of narrative tradition with the continent of Europe. To make this argument, the chapter focuses upon the importance, for British approaches to the fairy tale, of the seventeenth- and eighteenth-century French vogues for literary fairy tales, and the revolution in approaches to traditional storytelling spearheaded in nineteenth-century Germany. It is also proposed that the work of the Scottish fairy-tale collector and anthologist Andrew Lang in consolidating and popularizing these continental traditions at the end of the nineteenth century was instrumental in giving shape to British ideas about the fairy tale at the cusp of the twentieth century. Writers, translators, and collectors considered in this chapter include Marie Catherine d’Aulnoy, Charles Perrault, Jean-Marie Leprince de Beaumont, Jacob Grimm, Wilhelm Grimm, and Robert Samber.

Chapter Seventeen provides an ambitious synthesis of many of the concepts and authors addressed earlier in the volume in order to argue for two intertwining genealogies of modern fiction: on the one hand, the historical and social novel, and on the other, the Gothic, fantastic tales, and other non-realist literary forms. All these genres and forms encode questions of uneven development and often also express a sense of historical and epistemological disorientation. The chapter opens with examples of crossovers between fiction and other artforms to show the rich variety of forms and their influence on European culture. It then looks at cross-border influences and on individual nations’ different material conditions. Romanticism inherited and transformed a series of existing forms and themes, including travel literature, the epistolary novel, the Gothic, and the picaresque, into new forms, including the Bildungsroman, the fragment, the tale, and novella. These reflect an intense self-consciousness regarding historical time and place, even when they appear most ahistorical.

The sixth chapter focuses on Victorian anxieties about the empire’s powerful women, as reflected in Yusuf Khan Kambalposh’s Urdu travelogue, Tarikh-i-Yusufi. Published in 1847, it records the dreamlike vision of the Lucknow Muslim captain who arrived in England on August 1837 and three months later witnessed Queen Victoria’s stately procession for the Lord Mayor’s feast. In Yusuf’s eyes, this spectacle renders Britain a fairyland, an immersive virtual world indeterminately woven with the actual and the artificial. Its wonders emanate from visual recreations like Astley’s Amphitheater, St. Paul’s Cathedral, the Diorama, the Colosseum, Vauxhall Gardens, Madam Tussauds Wax Museum, and the British Museum – what he calls “magic houses” that connect disparate geographies, creeds, and languages virtually. Through his repartee with female fairies in these tourist sites, he imagines an ephemeral empire of strangers. Refashioning his masculinity in this empire, he behaves like the autonomous subject of a new female monarch who is yet to become an icon of imperial self-confidence.

Will May returns us to Plath’s early reception, and finds there a vital but overlooked context for her work: the whimsical. Taking seriously Plath’s fascination with the unthreatening fantasy worlds of children’s stories and their attendant winsome philosophy, May rehabilitates a literary term that has often been used disparagingly by the Movement poets. Instead, he shows us how indebted Plath’s dark comedy and verbal games are to whimsy. With close attention to her children’s stories, May unveils Plath’s cultural conversation with the domestic, the miniature and the absurd, though she herself was disingenuous about her interventions with whimsy. May debunks any notion that Plath’s poetry and stories belong in separate spheres. Neither, he argues, does her children’s writing.