Fairy tales, natural history and Victorian culture / Laurence Talairach-Vielmas, Professor of English, University of Toulouse, France.

"Fairy Tales, Natural History and Victorian Culture deals with the way in which natural history was connected to the world of fairies and highlights how shifts in the understanding of natural history, especially after 1859, had a significant impact on fairy stories and Victorian experiments with the literary fairy tale. By exploring the interaction between scientific and literary fields, this book shows the ways in which natural knowledge was shaped and disseminated in Victorian culture and illuminates cultural practices through which new representations of nature and the natural world were popularised. This original approach to Victorian culture, blending studies of fictional and non-fictional narratives, examines therefore a part of the history of the mediation of knowledge about nature in the Victorian period and points out how the mediation of this new knowledge contributed to the Victorians' awareness of environmental issues"-- Provided by publisher.