The Four Wonders, by Laura Alexander

Poetry, chapbook, 28 pages, from Bottlecap Features.

This collection blends the ancient theory of the four humours—choleric, melancholic, sanguine, and phlegmatic—with fairy tales. Historically, bodily temperaments, once believed to shape personality and health, offer us a way to explore human emotion, behavior, and narratives that have shaped our imagination. Each of the sections or “wonders” pairs one humour with several different fairy tales. Like William Blake’s Songs of Innocence and Experience, this collection is meant to look at varying contraries, to help us think about fairy tale figures in their human aspects by drawing on ancient ways of understanding the self. The humours provide a lens for interpretation of human motivation, spirit, longing, and distress. By pairing an ancient psychological framework with familiar fairy tales, this collection explores the complex emotional landscape of human experience, revealing how archetypes of character and temperament endure beneath the surface of story. It particularly looks at the complex relationship between gender and wonder. I tie wonder together with the psychological essence of the temperament with the story’s characters, themes, stereotypical expectations for characters. The choleric poems explore energy, reflecting tales of struggle and transformation. The melancholic poems engage the language of sorrow. The sanguine poems embrace warmth. The phlegmatic poems look at stillness in a chaotic and moving world. I invite readers to reconsider the tales they thought they knew, seeing them again through the shifting wonders provided by Galen’s ancient humoural theory.

Dr. Laura Alexander is Associate Professor of English at High Point University, where she teaches courses on Restoration and Eighteenth-Century British literature and culture, the art of melancholy, fairy tales, world literature, and women writers. She has twice held a national fellowship from the American Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies for research at the Folger Shakespeare Library. She is the author of seven academic books and has written more than forty articles appearing in books and journals. Her profile on Google Scholar may be found at https://scholar.google.com/citations?user=wRamOGEAAAAJ&hl=en. She won the 2024 Ruth Ridenhour Award for scholarly and professional achievement. In her free time, she writes poems and paints with her children.