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This review is intended to examine the development of representations of elves and fairies in British culture between the twelfth and the seventeenth centuries. It will argue that a very clear two-stage evolution in those representations can be found in literary sources, from an inchoate range found in different kinds of text, with no apparent collective identity, to a coherent sense of a kingdom, to which the common word ‘fairy’ could be applied, to an intense interest in, and discussion of, the nature of fairies. The first development occurred in the late middle ages, and the second after the Reformation, and both were pan-British phenomena. These literary changes were, moreover, paralleled at each stage, and perhaps responsible for, changes in perception in culture at large. The alterations in representations of these non-human beings, with no clear status in Christian theology, may have wider implications for an understanding of late medieval and early modern cultural history. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Analyses of nuclear fiction have tended to focus on the literature of the United States, particularly that of the 1950s. This article not only switches attention to British literature, but makes the case for the 1980s as a nuclear decade, arguing that the late Cold War context, especially renewed fears of global conflict, produced a distinctive nuclear literature and culture. Taking its cue from E.P. Thompson's rewriting of the British government's civil-defence slogan, ‘Protect and Survive’, as ‘Protest and Survive’, it identifies a series of issues – gender and the family, the environment and socio-economic organization – through which competing nuclear discourses can be read. In particular, it argues, British fiction of this period functions by undercutting the idea that protection is possible. Hence, although few nuclear texts advocate particular policy positions, they are characterized by a politics of vulnerability. Proposing for the first time the existence of a distinctive 1980s nuclear culture, it seeks to suggest the broad parameters within which further research might take place. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]