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Abstract: 'Fantastic Émigreés: Translation and Acculturation of the Fairy Tale in a Literary Diaspora' concerns the translation of fairy tales and the birth of the genre of fantastic literature in Victorian England. Imported from abroad and carrying a foreign taint, the fairy tale was quickly normalized into a stable and uniform genre. However, the standardization of the fairy tale negated the subversive qualities which had originally made it so attractive, necessitating the creation of a new discipline: fantasy. Fundamentally, I claim that the genre of the fantastic is a second generation immigrant, born of foreign stock and acclimatized to its new and modern surroundings through the tools of language and deliberate socialization. Using models of collection and translation from Western Europe and specifically England, I argue that the Victorians were responsible for the normalization of the fairy tale into, not one but two stable genres. The anglicization of the fairy tale in translation changed it sufficiently so as to create two new genres of literature: one, a standardized medium intended for children, and the other, following soon thereafter, the genre of fantastic literature. As with any immigrant tradition, while the trappings of the original culture may be altered, the core tendencies remain, remade in the image of the new homeland: in the 19th century, the genre of fantasy is born out of the fairy tale. |