Fall & Winter 2018 Catalog Copy

Title / Author / Editor

Staging Fairyland

Folklore, Children’s Entertainment, and Nineteenth Century Pantomime

Jennifer Schacker

Keynote

Examines pantomime and theatricality in nineteenth-century histories of folklore and fairy tale.

Copy

Staging Fairyland: Folklore, Children’s Entertainment, and Nineteenth Century Pantomime by

Jennifer Schacker examines the relationship between the theatrical form of pantomime and how it

informed the production and reception of folklore research. Schacker argues for an expansion of

the range of forms considered in the histories of genres and scholarly discipline’s and urges the

inclusion of theatrical performance within these histories. Staging Fairyland seeks to address this

overlooked gap in research and argues the need for this inclusion.

Schacker uses case studies from the early decades of the nineteenth century, which move between

the realms of print, performance, scholarship, and popular culture, to further her argument. She

examines production such as “Cinderella,” “Little Red Riding Hood,” and “Jack and the

Beanstalk” as well has ones whose popularity has waned since the nineteenth century, like

“Daniel O’Rourke” and “The Yellow Dwarf.” She also traces the performance histories of figures

like Mother Goose and Mother Bunch, who were often cast as the embodiments of both tale-

telling and stage magic, making them important stage roles in numerous pantomimes. These

examples demonstrate how the fairy tale as “children’s entertainment” is a cultural construction,
which has hindered the complex histories and ideological underpinnings of specific tales.

Schacker also explores the significance of cross-dressing in the history of pantomime and how it

relates to the complexity of identity in terms of class, gender, sexuality, and nationality. She

concludes her study by juxtaposing nineteenth century images of the fairy tale as a “dream,” from

the notion that oral traditions are akin to the collective and largely unconscious “national dreams”

and how the experience of pantomime was often seen as a hedonistic, sensual, and liberating

dream.

This book will entice scholars with interests in folklore and fairytale studies, nineteenth century

studies, theater studies, gender studies, and children’s literature.

Author / Editor / Contributor Information

Jennifer Schacker is associate professor in the School of English and Theatre Studies at the

University of Guelph. She is also the author of National Dreams: The Remaking of Fairy Tales in

Nineteenth-Century England and co-editor with Christine A. Jones of Marvelous

Transformations: An Anthology of Fairy Tales and Contemporary Critical Perspectives and

Feathers, Paws, Fins, and Claws: Fairy-Tale Beasts (Wayne State University Press, 2015).