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The Arts and Humanities Research Council-funded project 'Modern Fairies and Loathly Ladies' investigated what happened when a number of artists (musicians, writers, filmmakers) were asked to respond to and re-mediate a curated selection of traditional stories about fairies and loathly ladies. The artists came to the project with a spectrum of different views about fairies, ranging from belief in their existence to absolute scepticism about the supernatural. The works-in-progress they created were performed in a series of experimental shows at The Sage Gateshead theatre in 2019. The artists took up certain themes such as the otherworld, time slippage, fairies, and children, but were not attracted by others. Fairy material was reconfigured to reflect contemporary concerns about the natural world and to explore ways in which magical human–animal transformation spoke to women's experience. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Among the collections of The Folklore Society, London, are a number of hand-painted magic lantern slides by Henry Underhill, an amateur scientist and naturalist who lived in Oxford during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The slides illustrate Japanese, Irish, Russian, Norwegian and French folktales drawn from various printed sources. They add a new dimension to our understanding of folktale reception at the period and to the interaction of folktale texts and their visual realisations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article examines storytelling events as contexts in which propositions about the fairies and folk healers associated with them were appraised and contested. It considers the evidential rhetoric employed in narratives that argued for and against the existence of fairies and the powers of wise folk who trafficked with them. Particular attention is given to narratives of negative evidence including stories that depicted individuals who believed they have had supernatural experiences as deluded, either by their own imaginations or through the chicanery of others. As will be seen throughout, traditions of belief and traditions of disbelief were competing discourses that came into collision, interpenetrating and modifying each other in a dialectical relationship that informed individuals as they negotiated their own attitudes about the fairies and fairy healers. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Comments on various studies on folklore, compiled as of April 2002. Contemporary status of the fairytale as seen in the light of Jack Zipe's socio-historical approach; Analysis of dragons in twentieth-century fiction.