Years ago at Indiana University, or so legend has it, the English department graduate students and the folklore department graduate students would take turns stealing the bust of Stith Thompson, each department claiming as its own the great folklorist who taught English and founded the Folklore Institute at Indiana University. Jason Marc Harris helps to remind us of both the deep debt English studies owes to folklore and academic folklore studies’ roots in English.

Many Victorianists have examined the place of folk elements in nineteenth-century literature or have considered the Victorian literary fairy tales of Ruskin or Wilde or others. But Harris's Folklore and the Fantastic in Nineteenth-Century British Fiction takes seriously the study of folklore itself and asks us to consider the many different ways the fantastic was used in nineteenth-century literature and their implications. No literary critic or cultural historian has approached the topic of folklore in literature with as thorough grounding in both the history and the method of folklore studies. The result is a rich, engrossing study of material that helps us to see the literary, political, and cultural significance of both works that have been much studied—the Victorian ghost story, Peter Pan, the work of Robert Louis Stevenson—and works that will be new to many readers—from Victorian literary fairy tales to William Carleton and William Sharpe, of the Celtic Renaissance.

Harris emphasizes that the Victorian period's relationship to the folkloric fantastic was neither credulous (despite Conan Doyle's foolishness about the Cottingley Fairies) nor skeptical (despite claims that industrialism had driven away folk beliefs) but instead profoundly ambivalent. Folklore— and especially the fantastic—appears in a range of nineteenth-century literary texts, from references to and uses of folk superstitions in otherwise realist texts to the Victorian literary fairy tales of Ruskin and Wilde. Harris starts with the standard historians of Victorian folklore, Katharine Briggs and Richard Dorson, but he does not stop with a survey of Victorian antiquarians or anthropologists. He lays out the importance of understanding how folklore is studied, from the work of the great Linda Dégh on legend to the Aarne-Thompson folk motif index (one of my favorite academic tools).

Harris takes issue with literary critics whose work on the fairy tale generalizes on the basis not of the fairy tales of the folk but on fairy tales as rewritten by the aristocracy in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. He points to tale-types from Aarne-Thompson in which female roles are central to a story, “such as (AT [Aarne-Thompson] 311) ‘Rescue by their sister,’ (AT 451) ‘The maiden who seeks her brother,’ and (AT 425) ‘The search for the lost husband'” (52). “Thus, while [U. C.] Knoepflmacher and [Nina] Auerbach may correctly interpret many Victorian fairy tales by women as subversive of patriarchal standards, they erroneously conclude that these literary tales revise a folkloric tradition that emphasizes female passivity” (52).

Likewise, the fairies themselves look different when they are examined by a cultural critic who knows his folklore. Victorian fairies were not innocuous, as claimed by Nicola Bown. Harris cites a Highland legend of a fairy who indulges in “lacto-vampirism” (!), and he points out that “writers of ghostly lore, such as Le Fanu could readily adapt fairy fears to his gothic methods. … Bown's sense of fairies as innocuous may have resonated with urban sensibilities—particularly those Victorians exposed to fairy lore only as part of a world of cultural entertainment” (44). But Harris is interested in more than that world. He sees it as essential to understand the workings of supernatural folk tales and elements in folk culture before we can understand how they work when picked up in literature in the nineteenth century.

He is careful to detail the politics, for example, of James Hogg's uses of folk elements in Confessions of a Justified Sinner (1824). He calls our attention to the way Hogg creates what Harris calls, neatly, a “metaphysical contact zone” between folklore and literature, using multiple voices to make the folkloric work for literary (and political) purposes (103). And in Hogg's The Three Perils of Man: War, Women, and Witchcraft (1822), “representations of shared British lore (folk beliefs, memorats, and legends) defy boundaries of class, education, and nationality,” as Hogg “uses folklore to portray tensions between historical and fictional standards for narrative, upper and lower class models of behavior, and English and Scottish perceptions” (107). The Hogg novel indicates, Harris says, that “literary appropriations of folk legend and belief in the nineteenth century … parallel the growing inclusion of different peoples and classes in the British Empire” (125).

Harris's two chapters on race and imperialism focus on Le Fanu and Stevenson, and they are a welcome addition to the critical work on these two Victorian Gothicists. Harris examines the trope of the evil black-skinned woman in a Le Fanu's fairy story and in Carmilla (1872) and rereads that novel's vampirism, as well as other Le Fanu stories, in relation to folk belief, legend, and psychology. The Stevenson chapter focuses on how “folklore operates as an unstable tool of cultural power that evades any definite colonial containment, simultaneously serving as a subversive weapon against both the imperialists and the colonized” (150) in “The Beach of Falésa,” “The Isle of Voices,” and The Master of Ballantrae (1889). Fears of the supernatural in these works, Harris argues, “are primarily fears of social and financial impotence: poverty, sterility, death” (162). Stevenson's recognition of the “porous psychological borders between colonizer and colonized” (162), Harris argues, is echoed in the works of Celtic Renaissance figures William Carleton and William Sharp, whose cultural visions were emblematic of Victorian ambivalence about the folkloric. Carleton and Sharp use Celtic folk elements in full recognition of the potential dangers inherent in such use—how easy it is to become trapped in Matthew Arnold's vision of the spiritual, poetic, superstitious, irrational Celt. Harris shows Carleton and Sharp as waging a war “between the tensions of the individual and the community, the Irish and Scottish nations and the British empire, folk religion and official religion, and the self and the forces beyond” (191). Much of nineteenth-century use of the supernatural in literature is about those kinds of tensions and ambiguities, and Harris's work, with its keen attention to the detail of folkloric study in conjunction with the literary close reading, adds much to our understanding of that tense and ambiguous century.