Women’s cultural and political engagement with oral tales and traditions in European peripheries With Seekers of Wonder, Elena Sottilotta offers the first comparative study of women’s manifold roles in the collection of Italian and Irish folklore and fairy tales between 1870 and 1920. Sottilotta views the often-overlooked work of these women from an interdisciplinary perspective, considering both the politics and poetics of seeking wonder. In so doing, she centers women’s influence on the preservation and dissemination of oral traditions, bringing work that was once relegated to the margins into dialogue with work long regarded as canonical. After mapping sidelined, marginalized, and forgotten women folklorists, Sottilotta narrows the focus onto four writers and collectors who were inspired by Italian and Irish insular contexts: Laura Gonzenbach, who collected Sicilian wonder tales; Grazia Deledda, who wrote Sardinian ethnographic sketches, legends, and fairy tales; Jane Wilde, who
