A First Book of Fairy Tales

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Between 1896 and 1913, Méliès made over 520 films in his Montreuil studio in a Paris suburb. Among them, Zipes recognizes that “there are about thirty or more that can be called fairytale films in a strict sense,” a classification based on the Perrault’s tales, melodrama féeries, vaudeville féeries, literary fairytales, and original screenplays that Méliès wrote. Although Méliès was not the only filmmaker at the time to adapt fairy tales for the cinema, his innovation and passion for rendering dreams and imaginings with a greater reality made his fairytale films have continued to make an impact on contemporary filmmakers. Even within an individual collector’s career span mutations occurred, didn’t they? The Grimms’ tales became increasingly sanitized through subsequent editions.

Figure 1. The fairy tale in popular culture exists as fragments in haute couture. Beauty and the Beast, photographed by Annie Leibovitz, Vogue, April 2005. Source from: https://www.vogue.com/article/from-the-vogue-archives-fairy-tale-fashion.

De Valera, Sinéad (1927). Irish Fairy Stories. London: MacMillan Children's Books. ISBN 9780330235044. Based on popular text sources like Brothers Grimm, Charles Perrault, or Walt Disney, the adaptable nature of literary fairy tales has continually inspired creative writers, artists, and filmmakers to make the responses, reactions, and revisions ( Elliott, 2010; Haase, 1993a; Inge, 2004; Wertag, 2015). Innovation depends on tradition. Working with a plot, a character, images and motifs already familiar to the intended reader or audience, gives freedom to retaliate, protest and reinvent ( Warner, 2014). Feminism approaches ( Cahill, 2010; Haase, 2004; Lieberman, 1972; Warner, 1990), postmodern irony ( Bacchilega, 2013; Joosen, 2011; Smith, 2007), cinema’s visual spectacle ( Elliott, 2010; Hayton, 2012; Moen, 2013), and diverse narration offer the potential to attract widespread appeal. Successful retellings of well-known fairy tales usually bring new insights and transformation, imbuing stories with added significance and meanings in their reception. Hugely renewed interest, yes, and very much in academe, too. It’s because she’s an absolutely extraordinarily good writer. People are recognizing it – her writing is just astonishingly lively, and rich, and her thought hasn’t aged. She’s very fresh and agile in her thinking. She was a tremendous freethinker in the best possible way.

Wertag, Ž. F. I. T. (2015). Alice through the Ages: Childhood and Adaptation. Libri & Liberi, 4, 213-240. a b c d e f g h i j k l m n o p q r s t u v w x y Yeats, William Butler (1888). Fairy and Folk Tales of the Irish Peasantry. London: Walter Scott. Retrieved 20 November 2017.Preston, C. L. (2004). Disrupting the Boundaries of Genre and Gender: Postmodernism and the Fairy Tale. In D. Haase (Ed.), Fairy Tales and Feminism: New Approaches (pp. 197-212). Wayne State University Press. a b c d e f g h i j k l m n o p q Croker, Thomas Crofton (1828). Fairy Legends and Traditions of the South of Ireland vol. 3. London: John Murray. Retrieved 6 November 2017. a b c d e f g h i j k l m n Hyde, Douglas (1890). Beside the Fire: A Collection of Irish Gaelic Folk Stories. London: David Nutt. Retrieved 9 November 2017. Landow, G. P. (1992). Hypertext: The Convergence of Contemporary Critical Theory and Technology. Johns Hopkins University Press. One of the BESTbooks,not just graphic novels, EVER! This Rapunzel uses her long braids to lasso the bad guys in the wild west.

I think the same is true of canonical literature. The advent of a supposedly definitive text – as the Grimms’ aimed to be – acted as a brake on the exuberance of invention, on the infidelity of all the translators who were working not necessarily from one language to another but from one medium to another. But, as I said, she moved away from subversion and over the arc of her writing life she moved on to the idea that you could mobilize a story to create something more than that. Certainly her last two novels, Nights at the Circus (1984) and Wise Children (1991), use folk motifs to talk about common culture, tolerance, the new multiculturalism, and the new multi-ethnic culture. Calvino was following the lead of Russian scholars. How does his edition compare with, say, the next book on your list, Russian Magic Tales, edited by Robert Chandler? On the other hand, other voices have queried Disney’s adaptation, losing the meaning and value system attached to the “original” tale. But American academic M. Thomas Inge views the matter from a different standpoint. He argued that Disney’s version does no violence to the traditional patterns of the meaning of the original fairy tale but instead renews and affirms the story’s relevance for another century ( Inge, 2004).Mitchison married a Scotsman and they lived on the beautiful Mull of Kintyre. And she had a Scottish nationalist period in her life and she fought for fishing rights and all manner of things. She came from the Oxford intelligentsia-aristocracy. Fairytale offers a countervailing tradition that says that the artifice of art is the way to talk about truth and to make it something that is tolerable. This is so that you can listen to it or read it and absorb it and, as it were, know it, but it doesn’t totally undermine or horrify you because it’s in this other place: once upon a time. Horta, Paulo Lemos (2018). Aladdin: A New Translation. Liveright Publishing. pp.8–10. ISBN 9781631495175 . Retrieved 23 May 2019.