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List of contents
List of Figures
Acknowledgements
List of Abbreviations
Introduction
A tale of two fantasies
1. The phantom out of Oxford Street: Dickens’s fairyland
2. The Martian on Primrose Hill: Wells’s scientific romances
3. The bells of lost London: Orwell’s and Peake’s anti-fantasies
4. A pyramid of flesh on Villiers Street: New Worlds magazine and the Jerry Cornelius myth
5. ‘My home, the city’: Secondary-World London
Bibliography
Index
About the author
Hadas Elber-Aviram is Adjunct Assistant Professor at the University of Notre Dame, London, UK.
Summary
Finalist for the 2022 Mythopoeic Scholarship Award for Myth and Fantasy Studies
From the time of Charles Dickens, the imaginative power of the city of London has frequently inspired writers to their most creative flights of fantasy. Charting a new history of London fantasy writing from the Victorian era to the 21st century, Fairy Tales of London explores a powerful tradition of urban fantasy distinct from the rural tales of writers such as J.R.R. Tolkien. Hadas Elber-Aviram traces this urban tradition from Dickens, through the scientific romances of H.G. Wells, the anti-fantasies of George Orwell and Mervyn Peake to contemporary science fiction and fantasy writers such as Michael Moorcock, Neil Gaiman and China Miéville.
Foreword
Charts a new history of London urban fantasy stretching from Charles Dickens, through H.G. Wells and Mervyn Peake to Michael Moorcock, Neil Gaiman and China Miéville.
Additional text
This ambitious and important book advances a persuasive new reading of 19th and 20th-century British Fantasy writing, exploring the dynamic between a tradition of Rural Imagination, typified by writers like Ruskin, MacDonald, Tolkien and C S Lewis and one of Urban Fantasy typified by Dickens, Wells, Orwell, Peake and China Mièville. It marks an important intervention into the on-going critical debate about writing of the fantastic.
