Behind the innocent face of Victorian fairy tales such as Through the Looking Glass or Mopsa the Fairy lurks the spectre of an intense nineteenth-century debate about the very nature - and ownership - of childhood. In the engagingly written Ventures into Childland, U.C. Knoepflmacher illuminates this debate. Offering brilliant rereadings of classics from the "Golden Age of Children's Literature" as well as literature commonly considered "grown-up," Knoepflmacher probes deeply into the relations between adults and children, adults and their own childhood selves, and between the lives of beloved Victorian authors and their "children's tales."

IntroductionPart One: Refashioning Fairy TalesThe Sleeping Beauty in the Wood, Anne Thackeray RitchieBeauty and the Beast, Anne Thackeray RitchieThe Brown Bull of Norrowa, Maria Louisa MolesworthAmelia and the Dwarfs, Juliana Horathia EwingPart Two: SubversionsNick, Christina RossettiChristmas Crackers, Julian Horathia EwingBehind the White Brick, Frances Hodgson BurnettMelisande, or, Long and Short Division, E. NesbitFortunatus Rex amp Co., E. NesbitPart Three: A Fantasy NovelMopsa the Fairy, Jean IngelowPart Four: A Trio of AntifantasiesSpeaking Likenesses, Christina RossettiBiographical SketchesFurther Readings Copyright © Libri GmbH. All rights reserved.

Laurence Talairach-Vielmas explores Victorian representations of femininity in narratives that depart from mainstream realism, from fairy tales by George MacDonald, Lewis Carroll, Christina Rossetti, Juliana Horatia Ewing, and Jean Ingelow, to sensation novels by Wilkie Collins, Mary Elizabeth Braddon, Rhoda Broughton, and Charles Dickens. Feminine representation, Talairach-Vielmas argues, is actually presented in a hyper-realistic way in such anti-realistic genres as children's literature and sensation fiction. In fact, it is precisely the clash between fantasy and reality that enables the narratives to interrogate the real and re-create a new type of realism that exposes the normative constraints imposed to contain the female body. In her exploration of the female body and its representations, Talairach-Vielmas examines how Victorian fantasies and sensation novels deconstruct and reconstruct femininity; she focuses in particular on the links between the female characters and consumerism, and shows how these serve to illuminate the tensions underlying the representation of the Victorian ideal.

Daniel Karlin has selected poetry written and published during the reign of Queen Victoria, (1837-1901). Giving pride of place to Tennyson, Robert Browning, and Christina Rossetti, the volume offers generous selections from other major poets such asArnold, Emily Bronte, Hardy and Hopkins, and makes room for several poem-sequences in their entirety. It is wonderful, too, in its discovery and inclusion of eccentric, dissenting, un-Victorian voices, poets who squarely refuse to 'represent' their period. It also includes the work of Elizabeth Barrett Browning, George Meredith, James Thomson and Augusta Webster.