"Like the fragments of coloured glass in a kaleidoscope": Andrew Lang Mixes Up Richard Doyle's In Fairyland.

Marvels & Tales, April, 2003 by Jan Susina

Andrew Lang argued that fairy tales were composed of "[a] certain number of incidents" that can then be shaken 'into many various combinations of incidents." This also seems to explain the folklorist's composition of The Princess Nobody (1884), his literary fairy tale based on Richard Doyle's previously published illustrations for In Fairyland (1870). Lang manipulated Doyle's illustrations to create a new pattern for his literary fairy tale in a surprisingly postmodern fashion. While Doyle's In Fairyland crystalized the Victorian iconography of fairies, it also anticipates the increasing significance of the visual in the twentieth-century narratives.

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George Cruikshank's comic, black-and-white illustrations to Edgar Taylor's German Popular Stories...

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