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The Pleasant Nights - Volume 2
By Don Beecher. 2012
Renowned today for his contribution to the rise of the modern European fairy tale, Giovan Francesco Straparola (c. 1480-c. 1557)…
is particularly known for his dazzling anthology The Pleasant Nights. Originally published in Venice in 1550 and 1553, this collection features seventy-three folk stories, fables, jests, and pseudo-histories, including nine tales we might now designate for 'mature readers' and seventeen proto-fairy tales. Nearly all of these stories, including classics such as 'Puss in Boots,' made their first ever appearance in this collection; together, the tales comprise one of the most varied and engaging Renaissance miscellanies ever produced. Its appeal sustained it through twenty-six editions in the first sixty years.This full critical edition of The Pleasant Nights presents these stories in English for the first time in over a century. The text takes its inspiration from the celebrated Waters translation, which is entirely revised here to render it both more faithful to the original and more sparkishly idiomatic than ever before. The stories are accompanied by a rich sampling of illustrations, including originals from nineteenth-century English and French versions of the text.As a comprehensive critical and historical edition, these volumes contain far more information on the stories than can be found in any existing studies, literary histories, or Italian editions of the work. Donald Beecher provides a lengthy introduction discussing Straparola as an author, the nature of fairy tales and their passage through oral culture, and how this phenomenon provides a new reservoir of stories for literary adaptation. Moreover, the stories all feature extensive commentaries analysing not only their themes but also their fascinating provenances, drawing on thousands of analogue tales going back to ancient Sanskrit, Persian, and Arabic stories.Immensely entertaining and readable, The Pleasant Nights will appeal to anyone interested in fairy tales, ancient stories, and folk creations. Such readers will also enjoy Beecher's academically solid and erudite commentaries, which unfold in a manner as light and amusing as the stories themselves.Struwwelpeter
By Heinrich Hoffmann. 1999
The Disney Middle Ages
By Tison Pugh, Susan Aronstein. 2012
For many, the middle ages depicted in Walt Disney movies have come to figure as the middle ages, forming the…
earliest visions of the medieval past for much of the contemporary Western (and increasingly Eastern) imagination. The essayists of The Disney Middle Ages explore Disney's mediation and re-creation of a fairy-tale and fantasy past, not to lament its exploitation of the middle ages for corporate ends, but to examine how and why these medieval visions prove so readily adaptable to themed entertainments many centuries after their creation. What results is a scrupulous and comprehensive examination of the intersection between the products of the Disney Corporation and popular culture's fascination with the middle ages.Stranger Magic: Charmed States and the Arabian Nights
By Marina Warner. 2011
Our foremost theorist of myth, fairytales, and folktales explores the magical realm of the imagination where carpets fly, objects speak,…
dreams reveal hidden truths, and genies grant prophetic wishes. Stranger Magic examines the wondrous tales of the Arabian Nights, their profound impact on the West, and the progressive exoticization of magic since the eighteenth century, when the first European translations appeared. The Nights seized European readers’ imaginations during the siècle des Lumières, inspiring imitations, spoofs, turqueries, extravaganzas, pantomimes, and mauresque tastes in dress and furniture. Writers from Voltaire to Goethe to Borges, filmmakers from Raoul Walsh on, and countless authors of children’s books have adapted its stories. What gives these tales their enduring power to bring pleasure to readers and audiences? Their appeal, Marina Warner suggests, lies in how the stories’ magic stimulates the creative activity of the imagination. Their popularity during the Enlightenment was no accident: dreams, projections, and fantasies are essential to making the leap beyond the frontiers of accepted knowledge into new scientific and literary spheres. The magical tradition, so long disavowed by Western rationality, underlies modernity’s most characteristic developments, including the charmed states of brand-name luxury goods, paper money, and psychoanalytic dream interpretation. In Warner’s hands, the Nights reveal the underappreciated cultural exchanges between East and West, Islam and Christianity, and cast light on the magical underpinnings of contemporary experience, where mythical principles, as distinct from religious belief, enjoy growing acceptance. These tales meet the need for enchantment, in the safe guise of oriental costume.The Annotated Hans Christian Andersen (The Annotated Books)
By Hans Christian Andersen, Maria Tatar, Julie K. Allen. 2008
A richly entertaining and informative collection of Hans Christian Andersen's stories, annotated by one of America's leading folklore scholars. In…
her most ambitious annotated work to date, Maria Tatar celebrates the stories told by Denmark's "perfect wizard" and re-envisions Hans Christian Andersen as a writer who casts his spell on both children and adults. Andersen's most beloved tales, such as "The Emperor's New Clothes," "The Ugly Duckling," and "The Little Mermaid," are now joined by "The Shadow" and "Story of a Mother," mature stories that reveal his literary range and depth. Tatar captures the tales' unrivaled dramatic and visual power, showing exactly how Andersen became one of the world's ten most translated authors, along with Shakespeare, Dickens, and Marx. Lushly illustrated with more than one hundred fifty rare images, many in full color, by artists such as Arthur Rackham and Edmund Dulac, The Annotated Hans Christian Andersen will captivate readers with annotations that explore the rich social and cultural dimensions of the nineteenth century and construct a compelling portrait of a writer whose stories still fascinate us today.The Bear and, His Sons: Masculinity in Spanish and Mexican Folktales
By James M. Taggart. 1997
James Taggart contrasts how two men-a Spaniard and an Aztec-speaking Mexican-tell such tales as "The Bear's Son. " He explores…
how their stories present different ways of being a man in their respective cultures. He also focuses on how fathers reproduce different forms of masculinity in their sons, showing how fathers who care for their infant sons teach them a relational masculinity based on a connected view of human relationships.The Story Is True: The Art and Meaning of Telling Stories
By Bruce Jackson. 2007
Making and experiencing stories, remembering and retelling them is something we all do. We tell stories over meals, at the…
water cooler, and to both friends and strangers. But how do stories work? What is it about telling and listening to stories that unites us? And, importantly, how do we change them-and how do they change us? InThe Story Is True, author, filmmaker, and photographer Bruce Jackson explores the ways we use the stories that become a central part of our public and private lives. He examines, as no one before has, how stories narrate and bring meaning to our lives, by describing and explaining how stories are made and used. The perspectives shared in this engaging book come from the tellers, writers, filmmakers, listeners, and watchers who create and consume stories. Jackson writes about his family and friends, acquaintances and experiences, focusing on more than a dozen personal stories, from oral histories, such as conversations the author had with poet Steven Spender, to public stories, such as what happened when Bob Dylan "went electric"at the 1965 Newport Folk Festival. Jackson also investigates how "words can kill," showing how diction can be an administrator of death, as in Nazi extermination camps. And finally, he considers the way lies come to resemble truth, showing how the stories we tell, whether true or not, resemble truth to the teller. Ultimately,The Story Is Trueis about the place of stories-fiction or real-and the impact they have on the lives of each one of us.Stance: Ideas about Emotion, Style, and Meaning for the Study of Expressive Culture (Music Culture)
By Harris M. Berger. 1997
Why does music move us? How do the immediate situation and larger social contexts influence the meanings that people find…
in stories, rituals, or films? How do people engage with the images and sounds of a performance to make them come alive in sensuous, lived experience? Exploring these questions, Stance presents a major new theory of emotion, style, and meaning for the study of expressive culture. In clear language, the book reveals dimensions of lived experience that everyone is aware of but that scholars rarely account for.Though music is at the heart of the book, its arguments are illustrated with a wide range of clear examples--from the heavy metal concert to the recital hall, from festivals to dance, stand-up comedy, the movies, and beyond. Helping ethnographers get closer to the experiences of the people with whom they work, this book will be of immediate interest to anyone in ethnomusicology, folklore, popular music studies, anthropology, or performance studies.Hans Christian Andersen's Fairy Tales: An Illustrated Classic (An illustrated Classic Ser.)
By Joan D Vinge, Kay Nielsen, Hans Christian Andersen. 2014
Some of our most well-known tales were originated by the pen of Hans Christian Andersen. A prolific writer, Andersen’s oeuvre…
includes plays, novels, and poems but he is most well-regarded for his fairy tales. Stories such as "The Princess and the Pea”,” "The Ugly Duckling,” and "The Emperor’s New Clothes” are incredibly well-known and all from the mind of this illustrious fairy tale author. This lovely edition features color and black and white illustrations by Danish artist Kay Nielsen as well as all new foreword by Joan D. Vinge. There is an otherworldly quality in Nielsen’s art-deco styled pieces that provide adventurous and vibrant versions of these sixteen stories. The art still feels completely fresh and unique in this collection of masterworks featuring including "The Nightingale,” "The Red Shoes,” "The Snow Queen,” and others. These enchanting stories are wonderful for children, and collectors of fine art alike. Experience these classics again, and pick up this beautiful edition of Hans Christian Andersen’s Fairy Tales.The Nutcracker: The Original Holiday Classic
By E. T. Hoffman. 2018
On Christmas Eve, seven-year-old Marie and her eight-year-old brother Fritz anxiously await their Christmas gifts. When their godfather—a clock builder…
and toymaker—arrives, he unveils an ornate clockwork castle adorned with whirling figurines for the children. While Fritz plays with the clock, Marie is taken aside and given another gift—a nutcracker. After Fritz grabs the nutcracker from Marie and breaks its jaw by cracking too many nuts, their playtime ends and they head off to bed. When the clock strikes twelve, magic makes its way into this enduring tale and an epic battle ensues. This timeless classic, featuring all-new full-color and black-and-white illustrations by artist Arkady Roytman and abridged text by Gina Gold, is the perfect story to get anyone in the holiday spirit!Myth and Fairy Tale in Contemporary Women’s Fiction
By Susan Sellers. 2001
Woman as gorgon, woman as temptress: the classical and biblical mythology which has dominated Western thinking defines women in a…
variety of patriarchally encoded roles. This study addresses the surprising persistence of mythical influence in contemporary fiction. Opening with the question 'what is myth?', the first section provides a wide-ranging review of mythography. It traces how myths have been perceived and interpreted by such commentators as Sigmund Freud, Carl Jung, Bruno Bettelheim, Roland Barthes, Jack Zipes and Marina Warner. This leads to an examination of the role that mythic narrative plays in social and self formation, drawing on the literary, feminist and psychoanalytic theories of Julia Kristeva, Luce Irigaray, Helene Cixous and Judith Butler to delineate the ways in which women's mythos can transcend the limitations of logos and give rise to potent new models for individual and cultural regeneration. In this light, Susan Sellers offers challenging new readings of a wide range of contemporary women's fiction, including works by A. S. Byatt, Angela Carter, Anne Rice, Michele Roberts, Emma Tennant and Fay Weldon. Topics explored include fairy tale as erotic fiction, new religious writing, vampires and gender-bending, mythic mothers, genre fiction, the still-persuasive paradigm of feminine beauty, and the radical potential of comedy.Teaching Fairy Tales (Series in Fairy-Tale Studies)
By Gioia Timpanelli, Cristina Mazzoni, Allison Stedman, Ann Schmiesing, Jennifer Schacker, Prof. Nancy L. Canepa, Prof. Jack Zipes, Dean Donald Haase, Lewis C. Seifert, Prof. Anne E. Duggan, Professor Maria Nikolajeva, Prof. Cristina Bacchilega, Associate Professor Christine A. Jones, Julie L. Koehler, Kay Stone, Prof. Maria Tatar, Prof. Victoria Somoff, Prof. Gina Miele, Prof. Linda Kraus Worley, Prof. Faith E. Beasley, Prof. Charlotte Trinquet du Lys, Prof. Benjamin Balak, Prof. Suzanne Magnanini, Maria Kaliambou, Prof. Elio Brancaforte, Prof. William Moebius, Prof. Graham Anderson. 2019
Teaching Fairy Tales edited by Nancy L. Canepa brings together scholars who have contributed to the field of fairy-tale studies…
since its origins. This collection offers information on materials, critical approaches and ideas, and pedagogical resources for the teaching of fairy tales in one comprehensive source that will further help bring fairy-tale studies into the academic mainstream. The volume begins by posing some of the big questions that stand at the forefront of fairy-tale studies: How should we define the fairy tale? What is the "classic" fairy tale? Does it make sense to talk about a fairy-tale canon? The first chapter includes close readings of tales and their variants, in order to show how fairy tales aren’t simple, moralizing, and/or static narratives. The second chapter focuses on essential moments and documents in fairy-tale history, investigating how we gain unique perspectives on cultural history through reading fairy tales. Contributors to chapter 3 argue that encouraging students to approach fairy tales critically, either through well-established lenses or newer ways of thinking, enables them to engage actively with material that can otherwise seem over-familiar. Chapter 4 makes a case for using fairy tales to help students learn a foreign language. Teaching Fairy Tales also includes authors’ experiences of successful hands-on classroom activities with fairy tales, syllabi samples from a range of courses, and testimonies from storytellers that inspire students to reflect on the construction and transmission of narrative by becoming tale-tellers themselves. Teaching Fairy Tales crosses disciplinary, historical, and national boundaries to consider the fairy-tale corpus integrally and from a variety of perspectives. Scholars from many different academic areas will use this volume to explore and implement new aspects of the field of fairy-tale studies in their teaching and research.The Heart of a Stranger: An Anthology of Exile Literature
By André Naffis-Sahely. 2019
A fascinatingly diverse anthology of the literature of exile, from the myths of Ancient Egypt to contemporary poetryExile lies at…
the root of our earliest stories. Charting varied experiences of people forced to leave their homes from the ancient world to the present day, The Heart of a Stranger is an anthology of poetry, fiction and non-fiction that journeys through six continents, with over a hundred contributors drawn from twenty-four languages. Highlights include the wisdom of the 5th century Desert Fathers and Mothers, the Swahili Song of Liyongo, The Flight of the Irish Earls, Emma Goldman's travails in the wake of the First Red Scare, the Syrian poet Nizar Qabbani's ode to the lost world of Andalusia and the work of contemporary Eritrean fabulist Ribka Sibhatu.Edited by poet and translator André Naffis-Sahely, The Heart of a Stranger offers a uniquely varied look at a theme both ancient and urgently contemporary.The Fairest of Them All: Snow White and 21 Tales of Mothers and Daughters
By Maria Tatar. 2020
We think we know the story of Snow White from Disney and the Brothers Grimm. But acclaimed folklorist Maria Tatar…
reveals dazzling variations from across the globe. The story of the rivalry between a beautiful, innocent girl and her equally beautiful and cruel mother has been endlessly repeated and refashioned all over the world. In Switzerland you might hear about seven dwarfs who shelter a girl, only to be murdered by robbers. In Armenia a mother orders her husband to kill his daughter because the moon has declared her “the most beautiful of all.” The Brothers Grimm gave this story the name by which we know it best, and in 1937 Walt Disney sweetened their somber version to make the first feature-length, animated fairy tale, Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs. Since then the Disney film has become our cultural touchstone—the innocent heroine, her evil stepmother, the envy that divides them, and a romantic rescue from domestic drudgery and maternal persecution. But, as every fan of the story knows, there is more to Snow White than that. The magic mirror, the poisoned apple, the catatonic sleep, and the strange scene of revivification are important elements in the phantasmagoria of the Snow White universe. Maria Tatar, an acclaimed folklorist and translator, brings to life a global melodrama of mother-daughter rivalries that play out across countries and cultures.The Mary Poppins that many people know of today--a stern, but sweet, loveable, and reassuring British nanny--is a far cry…
from the character created by Pamela Lyndon Travers in the 1930's. Instead, this is the Mary Poppins reinvented by Disney in the eponymous movie. This book sheds light on the original Mary Poppins, Myth, Symbol, and Meaning in Mary Poppins is the only full-length study that covers all the Mary Poppins books, exposing just how subversive the pre-Disney Mary Poppins character truly was. Drawing important parallels between the character and the life of her creator, who worked as a governess herself, Grilli reveals the ways in which Mary Poppins came to unsettle the rigid and rigorous rules of Victorian and Edwardian society that most governesses embodied, taught, and passed on to their charges.This new edition is a completely rewritten and revised version of Rose's original, seminal, text. Adding a huge amount of…
new material, Robin Hard incorporates the results of the latest research into his authoritative accounts of all the gods and heroes. The narrative framework of the book includes helpful signposting so that the book can be used as work of reference, and alongside the narrative chapters, it includes full documentation of the ancient sources, maps, and genealogical tables. Illustrated throughout with numerous photographs and line drawings, it will remain the definitive account of ancient Greek mythology for generations to come.Charles Godfrey Leland and His Magical Tales (Series in Fairy-Tale Studies)
By Jack Zipes. 2020
Born into a wealthy and privileged family in Philadelphia, Charles Godfrey Leland (1824–1903) showed a clear interest in the supernatural…
and occult literature during his youth. Legend has it that, soon after his birth, an old Dutch nurse carried him up to the garret of the house and performed a ritual to guarantee that Leland would be fortunate in his life and eventually become a scholar and a wizard. Whether or not this incident ever occurred, we do know that his interest in fairy tales, folklore, and the supernatural would eventually lead him to a life of travel and documentation of the stories of numerous groups across the United States and Europe. Jack Zipes selected the tales in Charles Godfrey Leland and His Magical Talesfrom five different books— The Algonquin Legends (1884), Legends of Florence (1895–96), The Unpublished Letters of Virgil (1901), The English Gypsies (1882), and Gypsy Sorcery and Fortune-Telling (1891)—and has arranged them thematically. Though these tales cannot be considered authentic folk tales—not written verbatim from the lips of Romani, Native Americans, or other sources of the tales—they are highly significant because of their historical and cultural value. Like most of the aspiring American folklorists of his time, who were mainly all white, male, and from the middle classes, Leland recorded these tales in personal encounters with his informants or collected them from friends and acquaintances, before grooming them for publication so that they became translations of the original narratives. What distinguishes Leland from the major folklorists of the nineteenth century is his literary embellishment to represent his particular regard for their poetry, purity, and history. Readers with an interest in folklore, oral tradition, and nineteenth-century literature will value this curated and annotated glimpse into a breadth of work.The Short Stories of Oscar Wilde: An Annotated Selection
By Oscar Wilde. 2020
An innovative new edition of nine classic short stories from one of the greatest writers of the Victorian era.“I cannot…
think other than in stories,” Oscar Wilde once confessed to his friend André Gide. In this new selection of his short fiction, Wilde’s gifts as a storyteller are on full display, accompanied by informative facing-page annotations from Wilde biographer and scholar Nicholas Frankel. A wide-ranging introduction brings readers into the world from which the author drew inspiration.Each story in the collection brims with Wilde’s trademark wit, style, and sharp social criticism. Many are reputed to have been written for children, although Wilde insisted this was not true and that his stories would appeal to all “those who have kept the childlike faculties of wonder and joy.” “Lord Arthur Savile’s Crime” stands alongside Wilde’s comic masterpiece The Importance of Being Earnest, while other stories—including “The Happy Prince,” the tale of a young ruler who had never known sorrow, and “The Nightingale and the Rose,” the story of a nightingale who sacrifices herself for true love—embrace the theme of tragic, forbidden love and are driven by an undercurrent of seriousness, even despair, at the repressive social and sexual values of Wilde’s day. Like his later writings, Wilde’s stories are a sweeping indictment of the society that would imprison him for his homosexuality in 1895, five years before his death at the age of forty-six.Published here in the form in which Victorian readers first encountered them, Wilde’s short stories contain much that appeals to modern readers of vastly different ages and temperaments. They are the perfect distillation of one of the Victorian era’s most remarkable writers.Love is a key ingredient in the stereotypical fairy-tale ending in which everyone lives happily ever after. This romantic formula…
continues to influence contemporary ideas about love and marriage, but it ignores the history of love as an emotion that shapes and is shaped by hierarchies of power including gender, class, education, and social status. This interdisciplinary study questions the idealization of love as the ultimate happy ending by showing how the conteuses, the women writers who dominated the first French fairy-tale vogue in the 1690s, used the fairy-tale genre to critique the power dynamics of courtship and marriage. Their tales do not sit comfortably in the fairy-tale canon as they explore the good, the bad, and the ugly effects of love and marriage on the lives of their heroines. Bronwyn Reddan argues that the conteuses&’ scripts for love emphasize the importance of gender in determining the &“right&” way to love in seventeenth-century France. Their version of fairy-tale love is historical and contingent rather than universal and timeless. This conversation about love compels revision of the happily-ever-after narrative and offers incisive commentary on the gendered scripts for the performance of love in courtship and marriage in seventeenth-century France.