Fairies, Fairy Tales, and the Development of British Poetics

Fairy poetry has been central to the development of British poetics since the sixteenth century, and its offshoot, fairy tale poetry, has proliferated throughout the twentieth century. However, twentieth-century literary critics have largely failed to recognize fairy and fairy tale poetry as pervasive sub-genres, and tend to code such poems as marginal in spite of their near ubiquity. My dissertation addresses this scholarly oversight in four ways. First, it offers an alternative historicization of British poetics that identifies a centuries-long lineage of fairy and fairy tale poems in the work of nearly two hundred canonical and non-canonical poets. Second, it argues that the development of nineteenth- and twentieth-century literary theory is heavily indebted to theorizations of fairy tales and that recognizing the politicized use of fairy tales in theory can both contextualize and illuminate the political implications of apparently innocuous and apolitical fairy tale poems. Third, it grapples with the question of how such a central, prolific aspect of British poetry could be overlooked by critics by identifying blind spots in the structures of folklore, poetry, and children's literature scholarship that have contributed to the occlusion of fairy and fairy tale poetry. Finally, by transcending traditional chronological and movement-based categorizations of British poetry, it facilitates fresh engagements with twentieth-century British poetry, inviting scholars to robustly reevaluate critically neglected fairy tale poems in the oeuvres of canonical poets (Wilfred Owen, Denise Levertov), substantiate the recovery of long-neglected fairy tale poets (Charlotte Mew, Anna Wickham), draw new attention to constantly reprinted but rarely analyzed fairy tale poets (A.A. Milne, Alfred Noyes), interpret the nationalist and colonial implications of fairy tale poems written in response to canonical British fairy tales (Jackie Kay, John Agard), and reinterpret key terms like "fairy tale" and "myth" in parallel poetic movements like mythopoesis (T.S. Eliot, Ezra Pound). In sum, this dissertation resynthesizes British poetry to challenge long-standing assumptions about fairy tales and, in doing so, to foster a self-conscious reevaluation of methodological biases in contemporary criticism.