Results by title

25 books match the query 'Fairy tales'

cover of Clever Maids, Fearless Jacks, and a Cat: Fairy Tales from a Living Oral Tradition

Clever Maids, Fearless Jacks, and a Cat

Fairy Tales from a Living Oral Tradition

Anita Best

Utah State University Press, 2019

Clever Maids, Fearless Jacks, and a Cat showcases the stories of two Newfoundland storytellers, Philip Pius Power and Alice Lannon. Ethnopoetic transcriptions of these sensitive and artful tales, which have been passed on orally for generations as part of a community tradition, give accounts of living oral performances from the last quarter of the twentieth century and demonstrate the artistry that is possible without the written word.
 
Here, eight tales from Power and five tales from Lannon take up issues of vital concern—such as spousal abuse, bullying, and social and generational conflict—allusively, through a screen of fiction. In commentary following the stories Anita Best, Martin Lovelace, and Pauline Greenhill discuss the transmission of fairy tales in oral tradition, address the relation of these magic tales to Lannon’s and Power’s other stories, and share specifics about Newfoundland storytelling and the two tellers themselves. The text is further enriched by expressive illustrations from artist Graham Blair.
 
Clever Maids, Fearless Jacks, and a Cat presents the fairy-tale oeuvres of two superb storytellers as a contribution to interdisciplinary fairy-tale studies and folklore—countering fairy-tale studies’ focus on written traditions and printed texts—as well as to gender studies, cultural studies, Newfoundland studies, and Canadian studies. Students, scholars, and general readers interested in folk and fairy tales, contemporary Märchen, Newfoundland folklore, or oral tradition more generally will find much of value in these pages.
 
Support for this publication was provided, in part, by the University of Winnipeg.
 
[more]
cover of Enchanted Eloquence: Fairy Tales by Seventeenth–Century French Women Writers

Enchanted Eloquence

Fairy Tales by Seventeenth–Century French Women Writers

Edited and Translated by Lewis C. Seifert and Domna C. Stanton

Iter Press, 2010

This is a superb book on all levels. The translations of the tales are excellent. The research is impeccable. The introduction and notes are highly informative. Most important, Lewis Seifert and Domna Stanton have focused on unusual fairy tales that have never been translated before and are seminal for understanding the development of the literary fairy tale as genre. French women writers played a central role in the institutionalization of a literary genre in the French civilizing process that had huge ramifications in opera, theater, vaudeville, music, and film. Moreover, their tales influenced other writers of fairy tales in Europe. This book does an honor to their creative efforts and provides the basis for further research on the development of European fairy tales.
—Jack Zipes
Professor of German, Emeritus, University of Minnesota
[more]
cover of Fairy Tale Films: Visions of Ambiguity

Fairy Tale Films

Visions of Ambiguity

Pauline Greenhill

Utah State University Press, 2010

This ISBN refers to the ebook edition of this text, available directly from the publisher. It has erroneously been listed as paperback by some online vendors. The true paperback edition is indeed available at online vendors. Paste this ISBN into the search box: 9780874217810.

In this, the first collection of essays to address the development of fairy tale film as a genre, Pauline Greenhill and Sidney Eve Matrix stress, "the mirror of fairy-tale film reflects not so much what its audience members actually are but how they see themselves and their potential to develop (or, likewise, to regress)." As Jack Zipes says further in the foreword, “Folk and fairy tales pervade our lives constantly through television soap operas and commercials, in comic books and cartoons, in school plays and storytelling performances, in our superstitions and prayers for miracles, and in our dreams and daydreams. The artistic re-creations of fairy-tale plots and characters in film—the parodies, the aesthetic experimentation, and the mixing of genres to engender new insights into art and life— mirror possibilities of estranging ourselves from designated roles, along with the conventional patterns of the classical tales.”

Here, scholars from film, folklore, and cultural studies move discussion beyond the well-known Disney movies to the many other filmic adaptations of fairy tales and to the widespread use of fairy tale tropes, themes, and motifs in cinema.

[more]
cover of Fairy Tales from Before Fairy Tales: The Medieval Latin Past of Wonderful Lies

Fairy Tales from Before Fairy Tales

The Medieval Latin Past of Wonderful Lies

Jan M. Ziolkowski

University of Michigan Press, 2009

When did fairy tales begin? What qualifies as a fairy tale? Is a true fairy tale oral or literary? Or is a fairy tale determined not by style but by content? To answer these and other questions, Jan M. Ziolkowski not only provides a comprehensive overview of the theoretical debates about fairy tale origins but includes an extensive discussion of the relationship of the fairy tale to both the written and oral sources. Ziolkowski offers interpretations of a sampling of the tales in order to sketch the complex connections that existed in the Middle Ages between oral folktales and their written equivalents, the variety of uses to which the writers applied the stories, and the diverse relationships between the medieval texts and the expressions of the same tales in the "classic" fairy tale collections of the nineteenth century. In so doing, Ziolkowski explores stories that survive in both versions associated with, on the one hand, such standards of the nineteenth-century fairy tale as the Brothers Grimm, Hans Christian Andersen, and Carlo Collodi and, on the other, medieval Latin, demonstrating that the literary fairy tale owes a great debt to the Latin literature of the medieval period.

 
Jan M. Ziolkowski is the Arthur Kingsley Porter Professor of Medieval Latin at Harvard University.
[more]
cover of Feminist Narrative Ethics: Tacit Persuasion in Modernist Form

Feminist Narrative Ethics

Tacit Persuasion in Modernist Form

Katherine Saunders Nash

The Ohio State University Press, 2014

Feminist Narrative Ethics: Tacit Persuasion in Modernist Form establishes a new theory of narrative ethics by analyzing rhetorical techniques prompt readers of novels to reconsider their ethical convictions about women’s rights. Katherine Saunders Nash proposes four new theoretical paradigms: the ethics of persuasion (Virginia Woolf), of fair play (Dorothy L. Sayers), of distance (E. M. Forster), and of attention (John Cowper Powys). While offering close readings of novels by each author, this book also provides a new, interdisciplinary basis for coordinating feminist and rhetorical theories, history, and narrative technique.
 
Despite pronouncements by many theorists about the difficulty—even the impossibility—of doing justice in a single study to both history and form, Feminist Narrative Ethics proves that they can be mutually illuminating. Its approach is not only resolutely rhetorical, but resolutely historical as well. It strikes a felicitous balance between history and form that affords new understanding of the implied author concept.
 
Feminist Narrative Ethics makes a persuasive case for the necessity of locating authorial agency in the implied (rather than the actual) author and cogently explains why rhetorical theory insists on the concept of an implied (rather than an inferred) author. And it proposes a new facet of agency that rhetorical theorists have heretofore neglected: the ethics of progressive revisions to a project in manuscript.
[more]
cover of Forbidden Journeys: Fairy Tales and Fantasies by Victorian Women Writers

Forbidden Journeys

Fairy Tales and Fantasies by Victorian Women Writers

Edited by Nina Auerbach and U. C. Knoepflmacher

University of Chicago Press, 1992

As these eleven dark and wild stories demonstrate, fairy tales by Victorian women constitute a distinct literary tradition, one startlingly subversive of the society that fostered it. From Anne Thackeray Ritchie's adaptations of "The Sleeping Beauty in the Wood" to Christina Rossetti's unsettling antifantasies in Speaking Likenesses, these are breathtaking acts of imaginative freedom, by turns amusing, charming, and disturbing. Besides their social and historical implications, they are extraordinary stories, full of strange delights for readers of any age.

"Forbidden Journeys is not only a darkly entertaining book to read for the fantasies and anti-fantasies told, but also is a significant contribution to nineteenth-century cultural history, and especially feminist studies."—United Press International

"A service to feminists, to Victorian Studies, to children's literature and to children."—Beverly Lyon Clark, Women's Review of Books

"These are stories to laugh over, cheer at, celebrate, and wince at. . . . Forbidden Journeys is a welcome reminder that rebellion was still possible, and the editors' intelligent and fascinating commentary reveals ways in which these stories defied the Victorian patriarchy."—Allyson F. McGill, Belles Lettres 

[more]
cover of Forbidden Journeys: Fairy Tales and Fantasies by Victorian Women Writers

Forbidden Journeys

Fairy Tales and Fantasies by Victorian Women Writers

Edited by Nina Auerbach and U. C. Knoepflmacher

University of Chicago Press, 1992

This is an auto-narrated audiobook version of this book.

As these eleven dark and wild stories demonstrate, fairy tales by Victorian women constitute a distinct literary tradition, one startlingly subversive of the society that fostered it. From Anne Thackeray Ritchie's adaptations of "The Sleeping Beauty in the Wood" to Christina Rossetti's unsettling antifantasies in Speaking Likenesses, these are breathtaking acts of imaginative freedom, by turns amusing, charming, and disturbing. Besides their social and historical implications, they are extraordinary stories, full of strange delights for readers of any age.

"Forbidden Journeys is not only a darkly entertaining book to read for the fantasies and anti-fantasies told, but also is a significant contribution to nineteenth-century cultural history, and especially feminist studies."—United Press International

"A service to feminists, to Victorian Studies, to children's literature and to children."—Beverly Lyon Clark, Women's Review of Books

"These are stories to laugh over, cheer at, celebrate, and wince at. . . . Forbidden Journeys is a welcome reminder that rebellion was still possible, and the editors' intelligent and fascinating commentary reveals ways in which these stories defied the Victorian patriarchy."—Allyson F. McGill, Belles Lettres 
 
[more]
cover of House of Sugar, House of Stone

House of Sugar, House of Stone

Emily Pérez

University Press of Colorado, 2016

Emily Pérez’s House of Sugar, House of Stone weaves Grimm’s Fairy Tales into the business of modern life—laptops and late nights with sleepless children—to explore an undercurrent of terror about living in a family. These poems slip between the worlds of the wolf-haunted forest and the harried house of the contemporary artist/parent, until the two blend and bleed into each other. Children learn not to trust their parents, while simultaneously yearning to win back their affections. Parents similarly question their own trustworthiness as protectors. They are devoured by children, which leaves them equally apt to dismember a lion to protect their young as they are to leave those children alone in the woods. These musical, emotionally ruthless pieces occasionally find respite, but Perez reminds us that despite our best efforts to map our way to safety: “Either way / you’re lost. Either way / you’ll wander into deeper woods.”
 
[more]
cover of Just Wonder: Shifting Perspectives in Tradition

Just Wonder

Shifting Perspectives in Tradition

Pauline Greenhill

Utah State University Press, 2024

Inspired by folklore, television, fairy tales, social media, novels, and films, Just Wonder addresses crucial themes in social and ecological justice efforts. Moving into the mid-twenty-first century, wonder—as a potentially critical sociocultural, ecological, and individual stance—will play a significant role in reconceptualizing the present to imagine a different and better world.
 
These essays examine fairy tales and other traditional forms of the fantastic and the real to offer alternative expressions of justice relevant to gender, sex, sexuality, environment, Indigeneity, class, ability, race, decolonizing, and human and nonhuman relations. By analyzing fairy tales and wonder texts from various media through an intersectional feminist lens, Pauline Greenhill and Jennifer Orme consider how wonder genres and forms blend with diverse conceptions of seeking and enacting justice. International collaborators—both established and emerging scholars who self-identify with different subjectivities, locations, and generations and come from an impressive range of inter/disciplines—engage with contemporary and historical texts from various languages and cultural contexts, including interventions, counterparts, and comparisons to the fairy tale. Just Wonder offers a critical look at how creative wondering can expand the ability to resist modes of oppression while fostering equity, as well as encourage curiosity and imagination.
 
In a world that can be overwhelming and precarious, this book presents scholarly, artistic, personal, and collective-action interventions to identify and respond to injustice while centering wonder and, thus, imagination, questioning, and hope. Just Wonder will appeal to fairy-tale scholars; folklorists; students and scholars of film, media studies, and cultural studies; as well as a general audience.
 
 
[more]
cover of More Tales from Grimm

More Tales from Grimm

Wanda Gág

University of Minnesota Press, 2006

Renowned children’s book author Wanda Gág presents these classic Grimm tales, accompanied by whimsical illustrations. Drawing on her peasant heritage and childlike sense of wonder, Gág translated the fairy tales in a uniquely American vernacular tongue. More Tales from Grimm contains over thirty more, including “The Golden Key,” “The Seven Swabians,” and “The Wolf and the Fox,” as well as almost one hundred illustrations. No other editions of Grimm’s fairy tales for children can match Gág’s richness of prose and the humor, beauty, and sheer magic of her pictorial interpretation. Best known for her Newbery Honor winner Millions of Cats, Wanda Gág (1893–1946) was a pioneer in children’s book writing, integrating text and illustration. Born in New Ulm, Minnesota, she rose to international acclaim. In recognition of her artistry, she was posthumously awarded the 1958 Lewis Carroll Shelf Award for Millions of Cats and the 1977 Kerlan Award for her body of work.
[more]
cover of Morphology of the Folktale: Second Edition

Morphology of the Folktale

Second Edition

By V. Propp

University of Texas Press, 1968

This book is the classic work on forms of the European folktale.
[more]
cover of Natchiq Grows Up: The Story of an Alaska Ringed Seal Pup and Her Changing Home

Natchiq Grows Up

The Story of an Alaska Ringed Seal Pup and Her Changing Home

Donna D.W. Hauser

University of Alaska Press, 2023

This is the story of Natchiq, the ringed seal pup, growing up in her snow cave on the sea ice in northern Alaska with her mom Siku. Interwoven with Indigenous Knowledge from Qikiktagruk Elders from northwest Alaska, Iñupiaq terms, and scientific findings, readers follow Natchiq’s daring escapes from predators and seal dogs specially trained to help biologists find ringed seals.
 
Beginning in the 1980s, scientists started traveling to northwest Alaska to research the lives of ringed seals, bringing Labrador retrievers who could sniff out seals and their snow cave homes (called lairs) on the sea ice. Decades later, scientists partnered with the Iñupiaq people of
Qikiktaġruk (Kotzebue) to learn more about ringed seals. They relied on a combination of Indigenous Knowledge and scientific techniques to capture and apply tags to understand the movements and behavior of ringed seals.
 
But the Arctic homes of ringed seals are changing, and the long history of ringed seal science in the Kotzebue Sound proved to be just the beginning of long and cooperative relationships melding science and Indigenous knowledge. During 2018 and 2019, with unprecedented sea ice conditions, Qikiktagrumiut Elders and scientists returned to the ice to measure changes in the habitat available for ringed seal pups in the region.
 
 
[more]
cover of New Approaches to Teaching Folk and Fairy Tales

New Approaches to Teaching Folk and Fairy Tales

Christa Jones

Utah State University Press, 2016

New Approaches to Teaching Folk and Fairy Tales provides invaluable hands-on materials and pedagogical tools from an international group of scholars who share their experiences in teaching folk- and fairy-tale texts and films in a wide range of academic settings.
 
This interdisciplinary collection introduces scholarly perspectives on how to teach fairy tales in a variety of courses and academic disciplines, including anthropology, creative writing, children’s literature, cultural studies, queer studies, film studies, linguistics, second language acquisition, translation studies, and women and gender studies, and points the way to other intermedial and intertextual approaches. Challenging the fairy-tale canon as represented by the Brothers Grimm, Charles Perrault, Hans Christian Andersen, and Walt Disney, contributors reveal an astonishingly diverse fairy-tale landscape.
 
The book offers instructors a plethora of fresh ideas, teaching materials, and outside-the-box teaching strategies for classroom use as well as new and adaptable pedagogical models that invite students to engage with class materials in intellectually stimulating ways. A cutting-edge volume that acknowledges the continued interest in university courses on fairy tales, New Approaches to Teaching Folk and Fairy Tales enables instructors to introduce their students to a new, critical understanding of the fairy tale as well as to a host of new tales, traditions, and adaptations in a range of media.
 
Contributors: Anne E. Duggan, Cyrille François, Lisa Gabbert, Pauline Greenhill, Donald Haase, Christa C. Jones, Christine A. Jones, Jeana Jorgensen, Armando Maggi, Doris McGonagill, Jennifer Orme, Christina Phillips Mattson, Claudia Schwabe, Anissa Talahite-Moodley, Maria Tatar, Francisco Vaz da Silva, Juliette Wood
[more]
cover of One Fairy Story Too Many: The Brothers Grimm and Their Tales

One Fairy Story Too Many

The Brothers Grimm and Their Tales

John M. Ellis

University of Chicago Press, 1983

[more]
cover of Open Sesame: Understanding American English and Culture through Folktales and Stories

Open Sesame

Understanding American English and Culture through Folktales and Stories

Planaria J. Price

University of Michigan Press, 1997

We humans learn our language and culture through the stories and rhymes of tales we learned as children. By learning the twenty-six most popular and enduring stories collected in Open Sesame, ESL students learn about Americans and about life in America. Open Sesame facilitates discussions comparing and contrasting American folktales and stories with those of students' native cultures. Specific American cultural values are found in the text and debated by students who often find those values confusing and in conflict with their own values. The allusions learned from these American stories are extremely helpful for fluency. 

 Included are such classic tales as "Cinderella," "The Three Pigs," "Johnny Appleseed," and "Rip Van Winkle," and excerpts from more recent stories such as Charlotte's Web and The Wizard of Oz.
The goals of Open Sesame are to teach reading skills, build vocabulary, stimulate discussion, and develop critical-thinking skills. The text may also be of interest in the disciplines of children's literature, folklore, and cross-cultural studies. 
 
The text is accompanied by cassettes that "tell" the stories for learners who have not yet acquired all the vocabulary needed to read these original stories and folktales on their own.

[more]
cover of Politicizing Magic: An Anthology of Russian and Soviet Fairy Tales

Politicizing Magic

An Anthology of Russian and Soviet Fairy Tales

Balina/Goscilo/Lipovetsky

Northwestern University Press, 2005

A compendium of folkloric, literary, and critical texts that show how the Russian fairy tale acquired political and historical meanings during the Soviet era

We were born to make fairy tales come true. As one of Stalinism's more memorable slogans, this one suggests that the fairy tale figured in Soviet culture as far more than a category of children's literature. How much more-and how cannily Russian fairy tales reflect and interpret Soviet culture, especially in its utopian ambitions-becomes clear for the first time in Politicizing Magic, a compendium of folkloric, literary, and critical texts that demonstrate the degree to which ancient fairy-tale fantasies acquired political and historical meanings during the catastrophic twentieth century.
Introducing Western readers to the most representative texts of Russian folkloric and literary tales, this book documents a rich exploration of this colorful genre through all periods of Soviet literary production (1920-1985) by authors with varied political and aesthetic allegiances. Here are traditional Russian folkloric tales and transformations of these tales that, adopting the didacticism of Soviet ideology, proved significant for the official discourse of Socialist Realism. Here, too, are narratives produced during the same era that use the fairy-tale paradigm as a deconstructive device aimed at the very underpinnings of the Soviet system. The editors' introductory essays acquaint readers with the fairy-tale paradigm and the permutations it underwent within the utopian dream of Soviet culture, deftly placing each-from traditional folklore to fairy tales of Socialist Realism, to real-life events recast as fairy tales for ironic effect-in its literary, historical, and political context.
[more]
cover of Preserving the Spell: Basile's "The Tale of Tales" and Its Afterlife in the Fairy-Tale Tradition

Preserving the Spell

Basile's "The Tale of Tales" and Its Afterlife in the Fairy-Tale Tradition

Armando Maggi

University of Chicago Press, 2015

Fairy tales are supposed to be magical, surprising, and exhilarating, an enchanting counterpoint to everyday life that nonetheless helps us understand and deal with the anxieties of that life. Today, however, fairy tales are far from marvelous—in the hands of Hollywood, they have been stripped of their power, offering little but formulaic narratives and tame surprises.
 
If we want to rediscover the power of fairy tales—as Armando Maggi thinks we should—we need to discover a new mythic lens, a new way of approaching and understanding, and thus re-creating, the transformative potential of these stories. In Preserving the Spell, Maggi argues that the first step is to understand the history of the various traditions of oral and written narrative that together created the fairy tales we know today. He begins his exploration with the ur-text of European fairy tales, Giambattista Basile’s The Tale of Tales, then traces its path through later Italian, French, English, and German traditions, with particular emphasis on the Grimm Brothers’ adaptations of the tales, which are included in the first-ever English translation in an appendix. Carrying his story into the twentieth century, Maggi mounts a powerful argument for freeing fairy tales from their bland contemporary forms, and reinvigorating our belief that we still can find new, powerfully transformative ways of telling these stories.
[more]
cover of She Said No: The Gender of Consent from Fairy Tales to #MeToo

She Said No

The Gender of Consent from Fairy Tales to #MeToo

Jennifer Tamas

University of Delaware Press, 2027

She Said NO investigates the gender inequality in the authority to speak—and therefore to refuse—that prevailed in the establishment and interpretation of the French classics. By selecting authors deemed essential to French cultural heritage and erasing the works of women writers, this biased canon has systematically undervalued female agency—even in well-known works by both men and women, such as Beauty and the Beast, The Princess of Clèves, and "Little Red Riding Hood." With this book, Jennifer Tamas fills a striking gap in early modern French studies by conceptualizing consent in a society where being a woman made it structurally difficult to say "no." Yet, women did refuse. The history Tamas explores is one of forgotten, erased, misunderstood, or inadmissible refusals, and how they have been obscured. The #MeToo movement has brought questions of female agency and consent to the fore, and this book retraces an "archive of refusal" to serve as a source of inspiration for contemporary feminist discourse and to change our reception of the French canon. 

[more]
cover of Spellbound: The Fairy Tale and the Victorians

Spellbound

The Fairy Tale and the Victorians

Molly Clark Hillard

The Ohio State University Press, 2014

In examining the relationship between fairy tales and Victorian culture, Molly Clark Hillard concludes that the Victorians were “spellbound”: novelists, poets, and playwrights were self-avowedly enchanted by these tales. At the same time, Spellbound: The Fairy Tale and the Victorians shows that literary genres were bound to the fairy tale and dependent on its forms and figures to make meaning. But these “spellbound” literary artists also feared that fairy tales exuded an originative power that pervaded and precluded authored work. In part to dispel the fairy tale’s potency, Victorians resolved this tension by treating the form as a nostalgic refuge from an industrial age, a quaint remnant of the pre-literacy of childhood and peasantry, and a form fit not for modern gentlemen but rather for old wives.
 
Through close readings of the novels of Dickens, Eliot, and Charlotte Brontë; the poetry of Tennyson and Christina Rossetti; the visual artistry of Burne-Jones and Punch; and the popular theatricals of dramatists like Planche and Buckingham, Spellbound opens fresh territory into well-traversed titles of the Victorian canon. Hillard demonstrates that these literary forms were all cross-pollenated by the fairy tale and that their authors were—however reluctantly—purveyors of disruptive fairy tale matter over which they had but imperfect control.
[more]
cover of The Brothers Grimm and Folktale

The Brothers Grimm and Folktale

Edited by James M. McGlathery

University of Illinois Press, 1988

"Some of the best folklore and Grimm scholars from Europe and the U.S. combined to
give an excellent overview of the scholarly research and current critical thought regarding
Jakob and Wilhelm Grimm and their hugely popular Grimm's Fairy Tales. . . . The
book is directed to the general educated public and is very readable." -- Choice
 
[more]
cover of The Complete Tales of Ketzia Gold

The Complete Tales of Ketzia Gold

Kate Bernheimer

University of Alabama Press, 2001

The Complete Tales of Ketzia Gold is a lavishly poetic novel that draws upon the motifs of traditional German, Russian and Yiddish folklore and fairy stories to recount the visionary obsessions of a passionate young woman.

The Complete Tales of Ketzia Gold is a lavishly poetic novel that draws upon the motifs of traditional German, Russian and Yiddish folklore and fairy stories to recount the visionary obsessions of a passionate young woman. The narrative moves freely through time and space, uniting Ketzia Gold's early childhood with her sexual awakenings, creating a dreamscape of haunting vividness. Marked by a logical illogic and disarmingly sane madness, this haunting and innovative fable creates an emotional landscape that's as impossible to escape as it is for young Ketzia to inhabit. Kate Bernheimer interweaves hypnotic imagery and everyday life, moving back and forth through time, piecing together the fragments of memory and imagination with an obsessive lyricism that recalls the poetic fictions of Carol Maso. Bernheimer's story is a rich tapestry, patterned with childhood longings and the luxuriant complexity of womanhood.
[more]
cover of The Secret in the Wings: A Play

The Secret in the Wings

A Play

Mary Zimmerman

Northwestern University Press, 2014

A dark and mysterious homage to lesser-known fairy tales

Mary Zimmerman’s The Secret in the Wings adapts a group of lesser-known fairy tales to create a theatrical work that sets their dark mystery against her signature wit and humor. The framing story concerns a child and the frightening babysitter with whom her parents leave her. As the babysitter reads from a book, the characters in each of the tales materialize, with each tale breaking off just at its bleakest moment before giving way to the next one.

The central tale is told without interruption, after which each previous tale is successively resumed, with each looming disaster averted. As in Zimmerman’s other productions, here she uses costumes, props, sets, and lighting to brilliant effect, creating images and feelings that render the fairy tales in all their elemental and enduring power.

[more]
cover of The Stories of Hans Christian Andersen: A New Translation from the Danish

The Stories of Hans Christian Andersen

A New Translation from the Danish

Hans Christian Andersen

Duke University Press, 2005

On the bicentennial of Hans Christian Andersen’s birth, this collection takes Andersen out of the nursery and places him squarely in the literary pantheon. While Andersen’s tales continue to seize the imagination with their singular blend of simplicity, eccentricity, and charm, English-language readers have until now had to content themselves with inaccurate retellings and inadequate translations. Diana Crone Frank, a Danish novelist and linguist, and Jeffrey Frank, a novelist and editor at the New Yorker, offer a much-needed modern translation.

In this collection are twenty-two tales that best represent Andersen’s literary legacy, including such classics as “The Little Mermaid,” “The Ugly Duckling,” “Thumbelisa,” and “The Emperor’s New Clothes,” as well as largely unfamiliar stories like “By the Outermost Sea.” Illuminating notes clarify references in the tales. And in an introductory essay, the Franks explore the writer and his times, placing the enigmatic and often bizarre figure of Andersen among his literary contemporaries, such as Charles Dickens and Søren Kierkegaard, with whom he crossed paths; and they bring to life Andersen’s fascinating relationship with the United States. Illustrated with the delicate and beautiful drawings that accompanied the original Danish publication, The Stories of Hans Christian Andersen will delight readers of all ages.

[more]
cover of Under the Oaken Bough: Folk and Fairy Tales

Under the Oaken Bough

Folk and Fairy Tales

Simon Brooks

Parkhurst Brothers, Inc., 2017

Uncommon folktales and a few old favorites revived and retold for young people and tradition keepers. Folk and fairy tales celebrate different cultures and ways to see the world.

A collection of the author’s favorite folktales from his professional storytelling repertoire, retold in contemporary jargon for young reader, UNDER THE OAKEN BOUGH is an anthology which breathes new life into the folk and fairy tales of old. Professional storyteller, Simon Brooks, has written the stories he loves to tell in the style he uses on stage, whether at a library, school, college, private event or festival. Each story concludes with brief notes about the tale. This wonderful little book is a must have, not just for young people entering the realm of folk and fairy tales for themselves, but for parents who love to read to their children, teachers and librarians. The book includes a Q & A section with the author, a guide on how to tell stories, suggested reading, and a list of vocabulary words and their meanings. Half of the eighteen stories come from Europe, the remainder from the rest of the world. Some of these stories are old favorites, but inside you will find stories which can be hard to find, and seldom told. Join Simon Under the Oaken Bough and step into another realm, far, far away.

[more]
cover of Ventures into Childland: Victorians, Fairy Tales, and Femininity

Ventures into Childland

Victorians, Fairy Tales, and Femininity

U. C. Knoepflmacher

University of Chicago Press, 1998

Behind the innocent face of Victorian fairy tales such as Through the Looking Glass or Mopsa the Fairy lurks the specter of an intense gender debate about the very nature of childhood. Offering brilliant rereadings of classics from the "Golden Age of Children's Literature" as well as literature commonly considered "grown-up," U. C. Knoepflmacher illuminates this debate, probing deeply into the relations between adults and children, adults and their own childhood selves, and the lives of beloved Victorian authors and their "children's tales." Ventures into Childland will delight and instruct all readers of children's classics, and will be essential reading for students of Victorian culture and gender studies.

"Ventures into Childland is acute, well written and stimulating. It also has a political purpose, to insist on the importance of protecting and nurturing children, imaginatively and physically."—Jan Marsh, Times Literary Supplement

"A provocative and interesting book about Victorian culture."—Library Journal
[more]