Fairy tales – they help us make sense of our world, incorporating symbolism and morality tales in stories with a magical undercurrent. For so many of us, the symbols have become part of our cultural identities. As this academic compilation suggests, if we see a girl in a red coat or cloak walking down a woodland path or even a suburban street, without realising it consciously, we will often think of Red Riding Hood, wolves and danger. A red apple will make us think of Snow White.
Compiled by the Harvard Professor Maria Tatar, this work compares fairy tales to a kaleidoscope, incorporating sparkling beauty, economy if not austerity of form and visual power. Campsite fires may have given way to the flickering screen of the cinema or the television, and though the names of the characters may change, the basic stories remain the same.
Although we now think of fairy tales as children’s stories, their origins are somewhat darker. One of the many interesting features of this work is the chronology at the beginning. In this chronology, the history of fairy tales begins in 1550, with the publication of the Pleasant Nights, progressing through the centuries to include many household names, including Perrault, Grimm, Hoffmann, Hans Christian Andersen, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Disney, Margaret Atwood, Angela Carter and Roald Dahl. The chronology ends in 2004, with the publication of The Types of International Folktales: A Classification and A Bibliography (Uther, 2004).
Each chapter explores a particular theme in depth – from the very traditional Cinderella interpretations from many world cultures, to what is described as the Trickster Female, with Gretel as one of the archetypes. Modern heroines are also included, such as the Girl with the Dragon Tattoo and Katniss Everdene of the Hunger Games. While the stories vary, many can be “grouped” into particular types.
Chapters included in this well-researched and nicely presented volume are: Fairy tales: Copyright, and the Public Domain; Female Tricksters as Double Agents; While Beauty Sleeps: The Poetics of Male Violence in Perceforest and Almodovar’s Talk to Her; Fairy-Tale Adaptations and Economies of Desire; Fairy-Tale Symbolism; Trickster Heroes in “The Boy Steals the Ogre’s Treasure”; Exploring Empathy and Ethics in Tales about Three Brothers; The Creation of Cinderella from Basic to the Brothers Grimm; The Soul Music of “The Juniper Tree”; Sex, Crime, Magic, and Mystery in the Thousand and One Nights; Media-hyping of Fairy Tales; and Transformation of E.T.A. Hoffman’s tales from Hawthorne to Oz.
Overall, this work is particularly strong in encouraging the reader to view fairy tales from psychological perspectives. The authors hail from a wide range of respected organisations around the world. All of the chapters are well-researched and referenced, as would be expected of any works published by Cambridge University Press. There is a good mix of traditional tales and the more contemporary, such as the worlds of J.R.R. Tolkien and Frank L. Baum, although it is very apparent just how much our contemporary tale tellers owe to those long-established stories. There is also, in general, a good mix of cultures: European, American, Russian and Scandinavian and Middle Eastern.
This work would be particularly suitable for incorporation into collections in academic settings supporting children’s literature or folktales, at an undergraduate level or above. Pricing for both the paperback and the hardback editions is realistic.
