This course will examine the work of four extraordinary and original authors whose enchanting stories teach all ages much about life, the imagination, and the mysteries of the human heart. Deploying a double articulation that reaches both child and adult, these authors wrote fantasies that, like dreams, take us beyond the conventional idiom of ordinary reality into worlds of wonder which allow us to explore deep-rooted wishes, needs and fears. We will examine how each of our highly sensitive authors confounded the categories that license sexual normality, valued the eccentric and the singular over the conventional and the standardized, and encouraged the development of a social conscience either through satire or social criticism. Each author deployed fantasy in a revolutionary way as a correction of an overly puritanical, utilitarian Victorian mentality that tended to be deeply suspicious of the imagination; and, because all magic tales depend on the experience of miraculous transformations, their stories are also vehicles for spiritual exploration. We will read a selection of tales by the innovative Hans Christian Andersen; Lewis Carroll's brilliant Alice in Wonderland; Oscar Wilde’s strange and beautiful fairy tales, and Christina Rossetti’s narrative of forbidden fruit and female desire, Goblin Market.