ABSTRACT
Victorian literary fairy tales engage the same oft-discussed topics that figure in novels and essays addressing social conditions: industrialism, utilitarianism, the Woman Question, moral didacticism, and socialism. The Victorian Era experienced an intensification of interest in folk narratives that was part of a longer cycle of interest in folklore that manifested in two primary ways: collecting oral narratives and imitating oral narratives. Victorian authors soon began to try their hand at fashioning literary fairy tales which were acceptable to Victorian sensibilities and yet recognizable as part of the fairy tale tradition. While Zipes has focused on the Marxist aspects of Victorian literary fairy tales, and Knoepflmacher, along with Nina Auerbach, has claimed to resurrect an exclusively female tradition of storytelling, neither presentation examines what happens to the marvelous in these new treatments of folk motifs. Out of all of the authors in this analysis, it is only MacDonald who ever writes "fairy tales" targeting adults.
