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Children into Swans: Fairy Tales and the Pagan Imagination
Fairy tales are alive with the supernatural - elves, dwarfs, fairies, giants, and trolls, as well as witches with magic wands and sorcerers who cast spells and enchantments. Children into Swans examines these motifs in a range of ancient stories. Moving from the rich period of nineteenth-century fairy tales back as far as the earliest folk literature of northern Europe, Jan Beveridge shows how long these supernatural features have been a part of storytelling, with ancient tales, many from Celtic and Norse mythology, that offer glimpses into a remote era and a pre-Christian sensibility. The earliest stories often show significant differences from what we might expect. Elves mingle with Norse gods, dwarfs belong to a proud clan of magician-smiths, and fairies are shape-shifters emerging from the hills and the sea mist. In story traditions with roots in a pre-Christian imagination, an invisible other world exists alongside our own. From the lost cultures of a thousand years ago, Children into Swans opens the door on some of the most extraordinary worlds ever portrayed in literature - worlds that are both starkly beautiful and full of horrors.
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Oscar Wilde's Fairy Tales : Origins and Contexts
This book offers an innovative revaluation of Oscar Wilde's two collections of fairy tales, The Happy Prince and Other Tales (1888) and A House of Pomegranates (1891). Providing a comprehensive account of Wilde's familiarity with Irish folklore, this study challenges the prevailing consensus that the stories draw heavily on such material. By emphasizing Wilde's own stated views on the subject - and so contesting the assumption that he simply shared the well-documented interests of his parents, Sir William Wilde and Lady Jane Wilde ('Speranza') - the book relocates the stories within a variety of literary, cultural, and narrative traditions, both Irish and European. Acknowledging Wilde's often ambivalent and ambiguous statements about his Irish national identity, Oscar Wilde's Fairy Tales: Origins and Contexts offers a more nuanced understanding of the importance of Ireland to Wilde's art. The detailed readings of the fairy tales show that, despite the stories' continuing appeal to children, Wilde intended his fairy tales for a predominantly adult audience. The book also demonstrates the ways in which, despite their eerie and disturbing content, these fairy tales reaffirmed conservative values. *** "This superb analysis...presents a new and persuasive reading of Wilde's fairy tales. .... Highly recommended." - Choice, April 2012 *** "Markey's text is relevant to cultural studies scholars and literary historians of the Victorian era because of the attention to Anglo-Irish and European literary contexts, history, and culture, and the intriguing interpretations of Oscar Wilde's literary fairy tales." - Victorian Studies, Vol. 55, No. 4, Summer 2013~
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The Witch Must Die : How Fairy Tales Shape Our Lives
What accounts for the enduring charm of fairy tales? The answer, says the author of this enchanting and insightful book, lies in the way these stories help children deal with classic psychological conflicts. The tales do this by projecting the child’s own internal struggle between good and evil onto the battles between the characters in the stories. Cinderella, Rumpelstilskin, and Pinocchio vividly dramatize envy, deceit, gluttony, lust, and sloth, giving children a safe stage on which to confront their own "deadly sins.” When good triumphs over evil, readers also vanquish their sinful tendencies. Cashdan elegantly analyzes how fairy tales speak to human concerns, highlighting the roles played by iconic images like glass slippers and gingerbread houses, stepmothers, and sorcerers. He shows how fairy tales differ from culture to culture (in the Grimm version of Cinderella birds pluck out the stepsisters’ eyes but in Japan the stepsisters apologize and are forgiven); what happens when the tales are "Disneyfied”; and how fairy tales can have a surprisingly salutary effect on adult readers. Along the way he probes the eternal questions: Why does Snow White eat the poison apple? Why is the stepmother so mean? Why is Cinderella’s father never around when she needs him? The Witch Must Die recalls a time in all our lives when fantasy was king and life’s important lessons emerged from magical tales.