You may have to Search all our reviewed books and magazines, click the sign up button below to create a free account.
Fairy tales, often said to be ''timeless'' and fundamentally ''oral,'' have a long written history. However, argues Elizabeth Wanning Harries in this provocative book, a vital part of this history has fallen by the wayside. The short, subtly didactic fairy tales of Charles Perrault and the Grimms have determined our notions about what fairy tales should be like. Harries argues that alongside these ''compact'' tales there exists another, ''complex'' tradition: tales written in France by the conteuses (storytelling women) in the 1690s and the late-twentieth-century tales by women writers that derive in part from this centuries-old tradition. Grounded firmly in social history and set in lucid p...
"The Unfinished Manner examines the fragments produced by European writers and artists in the eighteenth century and earlier, fragments that were not the result of an inability to finish either texts or buildings but rather deliberate refusals to make the traditional gestures of conclusion. Most books published in the past few years on the fragment and the unfinished see it as a peculiarly "Romantic" early nineteenth-century exclusively poetic form. Elizabeth Wanning Harries argues, instead, that the fragment not only had a long history beginning with Petrarch but also played an important part in the history of the novel and other kinds of prose." "Conceptualizing the fragment as a genre, Ha...
In the 1970s, feminists focused critical attention on fairy tales and broke the spell that had enchanted readers for centuries. Now, after three decades of provocative criticism and controversy, this book reevaluates the feminist critique of fairy tales.
Fairytales with a twist from the Man Booker and Orange prize-shortlisted author of Room. In Kissing the Witch, Emma Donoghue unwinds thirteen fairy tales and writes them anew: Cinderella forsakes the handsome prince and runs off with the fairy godmother, Beauty discovers the Beast behind the mask is not so very different from the face she sees in the mirror, and Snow White is awakened from slumber by the bittersweet fruit of an unnamed desire. In these stories, Emma Donoghue reveals heroines young and old in unexpected alliances – sometimes treacherous, sometimes erotic, but always courageous. Told with luminous voices that shimmer with sensuality and truth, these age-old characters shed their antiquated cloaks to travel a seductive new landscape, radiantly transformed.
First Published in 1997. Happily Ever After is Jack Zipes's latest work on the fairy tale. Moving from the Renaissance to the present, and between different cultures this book addresses Zipes's ongoing concern with the fairy tale- its impact on children and adults, its role in the socialisation of children- as well as the future of the fairy tale on the big(and little) screen. Here are Straparola's sixteenth-century 'Puss in Boots' and a 1922 film of the story; Hansel and Gretel and child abuse; the Pinocchio of Colladi and of Walt Disney. AN ardent champion of children's literature and children's culture, Zipes writes also about oral tradition and the rise of storytelling throughout the world. But behind each of his essays lies the key question that all fairy tales will raise: what does it tale to bring about happiness? And is happiness only to be found in fairy tales?
In translating Charles Perrault's seventeenth-century Histoires ou contes du temps passé, avec des Moralités into English, Angela Carter worked to modernize the language and message of the tales before rewriting many of them for her own famous collection of fairy tales for adults, The Bloody Chamber, published two years later. In Reading, Translating, Rewriting: Angela Carter's Translational Poetics, author Martine Hennard Dutheil de la Rochère delves into Carter's The Fairy Tales of Charles Perrault (1977) to illustrate that this translation project had a significant impact on Carter's own writing practice. Hennard combines close analyses of both texts with an attention to Carter's activ...
From Court to Forest is a critical and historical study of the beginnings of the modern literary fairy tale. From Court to Forest is a critical and historical study of the beginnings of the modern literary fairy tale. Giambattista Basile's Lo cunto de Ii cunti written in Neapolitan dialect and published in 1634-36, comprises fifty fairy tales and was the first integral collection of literary fairy tales to appear in Western Europe. It contains some of the best known fairy-tales types, such as Sleeping Beauty, Puss in Boots, Cinderella, and others, many in their earliest versions. Although it became a central reference point for subsequent fairy tale writers, such as Perrault and the Grimms, ...
Ever since its early modern inception as a literary genre unto its own, the fairy tale has frequently provided authors with a textual space in which to reflect on the nature, status and function of their own writing and that of literature in general. At the same time, it has served as an ideal laboratory for exploring and experimenting with the boundaries of literary convention and propriety. While scholarship pertaining to these phenomena has focused primarily on the fairy-tale adaptations and deconstructions of postmodern(ist) writers, this essay collection adopts a more diachronic approach. It offers fairy-tale scholars and students a series of theoretical and literary-historical expositions, as well as case studies on English, French, German, Swedish, Danish, and Romanian texts from the seventeenth to the twenty-first century, by authors as diverse as Marie-Catherine d’Aulnoy, Rikki Ducornet, Hans Christian Andersen and Robert Coover.
Harries introduces the stories written by 17th century French women, or conteuses, female storytellers. Their stories omitted from the traditional, largely male-authored, fairy tale "canon."