Chapter Eighteen introduces us to Scandinavian Romanticism, which helped Denmark, Sweden, and Norway imagine themselves as independent nations by drawing on Old Norse and medieval sources, contributing to a shared sense of identity. The chapter explores its origins in Mallet and eighteenth-century antiquarianism, drawing parallels with Ossian and Percy, and discussing Ewald’s Rolf Krage. It then looks at some of the defining features of Scandinavian ballads, including the figures of elf and shield maiden. Sweden’s loss of Finland led to an ‘Old Scandinavian’ turn in which the Viking became a common topos, as we discover in works by Tegnér and Wergeland. It also led to calls for a new mythology, answered among others by Ewald, Grundtvig, and Oehlenschläger. Other writers include the young Ibsen, who began his career with plays about Norse mythology, and Erik Gustaf Geiger whose stories idealise Nordic liberty. Fairy tales were also an important Romantic genre. Möller discusses the motif of the Isle of Felicity in works by Almqvist and Atterbom before turning to the characteristic features of Andersen’s tales. The chapter concludes with a brief overview of Scandinavian Romantic fiction, including male-authored historical romances but also domestic novels written by women that look towards realism.

This chapter focuses on The Magic Flute’s links to theatrical aesthetics of the Vienna court theater as well as debates surrounding the late eighteenth-century calls for the establishment of a German national theater tradition. This exploration suggests that Mozart’s unique experiences with the world of late eighteenth-century German theater traditions shaped The Magic Flute’s libretto significantly. Mozart’s contributions to Schikaneder’s libretto in fact enhance the work’s status as both a culmination of decades-long debates about German national theater and a harbinger of a future course for German national opera.

This chapter explores the ways in which modern works of Fantasy remake longstanding cultural forms. It modifies John Clute’s notion of taproot texts by focusing on larger-scale modes of meaning-making rather than individual influential works, examining the ways in which Fantasy is deeply informed by myths and legends, epic and romance, folk and fairy tales, and religions. Any one of these could be the subject for a book in itself, so the chapter employs a selective approach, giving a sense of each mode’s larger patterns, exploring how these have been taken up in Fantasy and examining a small selection of case studies. The myths and legends section focuses on how recent Fantasy texts remake the story of Hades and Persephone, considering Anaïs Mitchell’s musical Hadestown, Supergiant’s game Hades and Rachel Smythe’s webtoon Lore Olympus. Other key works discussed include Avatar: The Last Airbender, Sofia Samatar’s The Winged Histories, Angela Carter’s ‘The Bloody Chamber’ and Kelly Link’s ‘Travels with the Snow Queen’.

In “Post-Civil War Black Childhoods,” Nazera Sadiq Wright surveys some of the vast body of Black Reconstruction-era literature that features Black children as central characters, with special emphasis on Steward’s serialized Christian Recorder short story “The Gem of the Alley” and attention to work by Collins and Harper. Wright shows how repeated (and often accurate) representations of the little charitable institutions did to protect Black children contrasts with orphaned Black children’s dutiful and intentional displays of charity and good will toward those less fortunate. Wright asserts that, especially in frameworks centered on family reunification, Black child characters express the damage from class and racial divides as well as the healing grace of Black community activism in the post-Civil War era.

Magical realism, primitivism and ethnography are historically and theoretically interrelated discourses. Mavellous folk and fairy tales, legends and myths are remote origins that received renewed attention with the rise of the avant-grade and American archaeology in the early twentieth century. In the Hispanic tradition, antecedents date back to medieval lore, which inspired chivalric and pastoral romances as well as the picaresque novel, finding a seminal synthesis in Don Quixote. In the New World, the Chronicles of the Indies, with their outlandish tales of discovery, drew not only from medieval and early Renaissance worldviews, but also from marvellous sources as varied as John Mandeville, Marco Polo, Ptolemy, Pliny and the Bible. Latin American authors have consistently cited these sources of magical realism, yet they looked at them through the prism of the avant-garde. Alejo Carpentier conceived of his seminal concept of lo real maravilloso americano as an answer to the Surrealists’ artificial merveilleux. Carpentier and Miguel Ángel Asturias, with his Surrealist view of the ancient Maya, coincided in late 1920s Paris with avant-garde primitivism and another magic realist, Venezuelan Arturo Uslar-Pietri, a close associate of Massimo Bontempelli, whose version of magical realism became their true spark, whereas Franz Roh’s influence in Latin America was negligible. Later authors like Juan Rulfo and Gabriel García Márquez significantly developed magical realist narratology, consolidating the Latin American trend and making it indispensable for understanding its international expansion based on the allegorical reinterpretation, and subversion, of dominant history – a crucial postcolonial endeavour for cultures around the world.