HONR 211: World of Fairy Tales

This work overturns traditional views of the origins of fairy tales and documents their actual origins and transmission. Where did Cinderella come from? Puss in Boots? Rapunzel? The origins of fairy tales are looked at in a new way in these highly engaging pages.

This revised, expanded, and updated edition of the 1979 landmark Breaking the Magic Spell examines the enduring power of fairy tales and the ways they invade our subjective world. In seven provocative essays, Zipes discusses the importance of investigating oral folk tales in their socio-political context and traces their evolution into literary fairy tales, a metamorphosis that often diminished the ideology of the original narrative.

A few of the topics covered in this volume: oral narration in contemporary society; madness and cure in the 1001 Nights; the female voice in folklore and fairy tale; change in narrative form; tests, tasks, and trials in the Grimms' fairy tales; and folklorists as agents of nationalism.

In what ways do we look at the fairy tale and its tradition today? Originally an oral narrative based on formulaic repetitions, the fairy tale allows the contemporary writer to be at play with tradition, through a recovering of the canons and formulas of the classical tales that is experimental and ever changing.

These seventeen essays, written between 1922 and 1953, are among Roheim's most significant published writings and are collected here for the first time to introduce a new generation of readers to his unique interpretations of myths, folktales, and legends. From Australian aboriginal mythology to Native American trickster tales, from the Grimm folktale canon to Hungarian folk belief, Roheim explores a wide range of issues, such as the relationship of dreams to folklore and the primacy of infantile conditioning in the formation of adult fantasy.

Most early fairy tale authors had a lot to say about what they wrote, this book collects translations of the forewords and afterwords by original fairy tale authors and commentaries by their contemporaries. These reflections shed a bright light on both the tales and on their composition, but in every case, they were removed soon after their first publication. Remaining largely unknown, their absence created empty space that later readers filled with their own views about the conditions of production and reception of the tales.

Murder, mutilation, cannibalism, infanticide, and incest: the darker side of classic fairy tales is the subject of this groundbreaking and intriguing study of Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm's Nursery and Household Tales. This expanded edition includes a new preface and an appendix featuring translations of six tales with commentary by Maria Tatar. Throughout the book, Tatar draws on the disciplinary tools of psychoanalysis and folklore while also providing historical context to explore the harsher aspects of these stories, presenting new interpretations of tales that engage in a kind of cultural repetition compulsion.

Tales of magic, tales in print traces the textual history of a number of fairy tale clusters, linking the findings of literary historians on the sixteenth to eighteenth centuries to the material collected by nineteenth- and twentieth-century field workers. While it places fairy tales as a genre firmly in a European context, it also follows particular stories in their dispersion over the rest of the world.

In Marvelous Geometry Jessica Tiffin argues that within twentieth- and twenty-first-century Western literature there exists a diverse body of fairy-tale texts that display a common thread of metafictional self-awareness. In this broadly comparative study she explores contemporary fairy-tale fictions found in modern literature and live-action and animated film and television to explore fairy tale's ability to endlessly reinvent itself and the cultural implications of its continued relevance.

Focusing on the fairy tale in nineteenth-century England, National Dreams examines influential but critically neglected early experiments in the presentation of international tale traditions to English readers. Jennifer Schacker looks at such wondrous story collections as Grimms' fairy tales and The Arabian Nights to trace the larger stories of cross-cultural encounter in which these books were originally embedded. Examining aspects of publishing history alongside her critical readings of tale collections' introductions, annotations, story texts, and illustrations, Schacker's National Dreams reveals the surprising ways fairy tales shaped and were shaped by their readers.

This book offers new, often unexpected, but always intriguing portraits of the writers of classic fairy tales. For years these authors, who wrote from the sixteenth to the nineteenth centuries, have been either little known or known through skewed, frequently sentimentalized biographical information. Uncovering what was obscured for years and with newly discovered evidence, contributors to this fascinating and much-needed volume provide a historical context for Europe's fairy tales.

Victorian Britain was full of excitement and debate about the new scientific ideas. In Science in Wonderland, Melanie Keene shows how Victorian writers used the medium of the fairy tale to bring chemistry, entomology, palaeontology, and evolution to young audiences.

An internationally known folklorist interweaves legends and stories about fairies with a discussion of the origins of fairy beliefs, kinds of fairies, and fairy powers, sports, and mortality in addition to indexing types of tales and motifs