The Classic Fairy Tales focuses on six tale types: "Little Red Riding Hood," "Beauty and the Beast," "Snow White," "Cinderella," "Bluebeard," and "Hansel and Gretel," and presents multicultural variants and sophisticated literary rescriptings. Also reprinted are tales by Hans Christian Andersen and Oscar Wilde."Criticism" gathers twelve essays that interpret aspects of fairy tales, including their social origins, historical evolution, psychological drama, gender issues, and national identities.A Selected Bibliography is included.

    Gathered from around the world, from regions as diverse as sub-Saharan Africa and Western Europe, from North and South American Indian cultures and New World settlers, from Asia and the Middle East, these 100 folktales celebrate strong female heroines.Fearless Girls, Wise Women, and Beloved Sisters is for all women who are searching to define who they are, to redefine the world and shape their collective sensibility. It is for men who want to know more about what it means to be a woman. It is for our daughters and our sons, so that they can learn to value all kinds of courage, courage in battle and the courage of love. It is for all of us to help build a more just vision of woman.

    Sections group tales together by theme or juxtapose variations of individual tales, inviting comparison and analysis across cultures and genres. An accessible section of critical selections provides a foundation for readers to analyze, debate, and interpret the tales for themselves. An expanded introduction by the editors looks at the history of folk and fairy tales and distinguishes between the genres, while revised introductions to individual sections provide more detailed history of particular tellers and tales, paying increased attention to the background and cultural origin of each tale. A selection of illustrations from editions of classic tales from the 19th to the 21st centuries is also included.

    350 full-color photos, paintings & illustrations.

    The volume includes over forty of the Grimms' most beloved stories, including:Rapunzel * Hansel and Gretel * The Brave Little Tailor * Cinderella * Little Red Riding Hood * The Robber Bridegroom * Briar Rose * Snow White * Rumplestilskin * The Golden Goose * The Singing, Soaring Lark * The Frog King * The Juniper Tree * and Mother HolleWith over 150 paintings and drawings from the most celebrated fairy tale illustrators, including George Cruikshank, Paul Hey, Walter Crane, Warwick Goble, Kay Nielsen, and Arthur Rackham.

    -- Alan Dundes. Propp's work is seminal...[and], now that it is available in a new edition, should be even more valuable to folklorists who are directing their attention to the form of the folktale, especially to those structural characteristics which are common to many entries coming from even different cultures. -- Choice

    Yeats included almost every sort of Irish folk in this marvelous compendium of fairy tales and songs that he collected and edited for publication in 1892.-- Yeats was fascinated by Irish myths and folklore, and joined forces with the writers of the Irish Literary Revival. He studied Irish folk tales and chose to reintroduce the glory and significance of Ireland's past through this unique literature.

    In this intimate history, Valerie Paradiz tells the real story of the greatest literary collaboration of the nineteenth century, and gives the long-lost narrators of these beloved tales their due. Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm were major German intellects of their time, contemporaries of both Goethe and Schiller. But as Paradiz reveals here, the romantic image of the two brothers traveling the countryside, transcribing tales told to them by peasants, is far from the truth. More than half of the tales the Grimm brothers collected were contributed by women friends from the upper classes. Set against the backdrop of the Napoleonic wars and the high years of German romanticism, Clever Maids chronicles this most fascinating enterprise in literary history, and illuminates the ways the Grimm tales-with their mythic portrayals of courage, sacrifice, and betrayal-still resonate so powerfully today.

    Why are storytellers so often women, and how does that affect the status of fairy tales? Are they a source of wisdom or a misleading temptation to indulge in romancing?

    With this volume, the holy trinity of fairy tales - the Brothers Grimm, Charles Perrault, and Hans Christian Andersen - becomes a quartet. In the 1850s, Franz Xaver von Schönwerth traversed the forests, lowlands, and mountains of northern Bavaria to record fairy tales, gaining the admiration of even the Brothers Grimm. Most of Schönwerth's work was lost - until a few years ago, when thirty boxes of manu­scripts were uncovered in a German municipal archive.Now, for the first time, Schönwerth's lost fairy tales are available in English. Violent, dark, and full of action, and upending the relationship between damsels in distress and their dragon-slaying heroes, these more than seventy stories bring us closer than ever to the unadorned oral tradition in which fairy tales are rooted, revolutionizing our understanding of a hallowed genre.

    Illustrated with woodcuts.With black-and-white drawings throughoutPart of the Pantheon Fairy Tale and Folklore Library

    The more than 175 tales culled from a centuries-old Russian storytelling tradition by the outstanding Russian ethnographer Aleksandr Afanas’ev reveal a rich, robust world of the imagination that will fascinate readers both young and old.With black-and-white drawings throughoutPart of the Pantheon Fairy Tale and Folklore Library

    Every people or nation has its own way of experiencing this psychic reality, and so a study of the world's fairy tales yields a wealth of insights into the archetypal experiences of humankind. Perhaps the foremost authority on the psychological interpretation of fairy tales is Marie-Louise von Franz. In this book—originally published as An Introduction to the Interpretation of Fairy Tales —she describes the steps involved in analyzing and illustrates them with a variety of European tales, from "Beauty and the Beast" to "The Robber Bridegroom." Dr. von Franz begins with a history of the study of fairy tales and the various theories of interpretation. By way of illustration she presents a detailed examination of a simple Grimm's tale, "The Three Feathers," followed by a comprehensive discussion of motifs related to Jung's concept of the shadow, the anima, and the animus. This revised edition has been corrected and updated by the author.

    In fact original fairy tales are still being written. Over the last century and a half many well-known authors have used the characters and settings and themes of traditional tales such as 'Cinderella', 'Hansel and Gretel', and 'Beauty and the Beast' to produce new and characteristic works of wonder and enchantment. The Oxford Book of Modern Fairy Tales brings together forty of the best of these stories by British and American writers from John Ruskin and Nathaniel Hawthorne to I. B. Singer and Angela Carter. These tales are full of princes and princesses, witches and dragons and talking animals, magic objects, evil spells, and unexpected endings. Some of their authors, like John Ruskin and Oscar Wilde, use the form to point a social or spiritual moral; others such as Jeanne Desy and Richard Kennedy, turn the traditional stories inside out to extraordinary effect. James Thurber, Bernard Malamud, and Donald Barthelme, among many others, bring the characters and plots of the traditional fairy tale into the contemporary world to make satiric comments on modern life. The literary skill, wit, and sophistication of these stories appeal to an adult audience, even though some of them were originally written for children. They include light-hearted comic fairy stories like Charles Dickens's 'The Magic Fishbone' and L. F. Baum's 'The Queen of Quok', thoughtful and often moving tales like Lord Dunsany's 'The Kith of the Elf Folk' and Philip K. Dick's 'The King of the Elves', and profoundly disturbing ones like Lucy LaneClifford's 'The New Mother', and Ursula Le Guin's 'The Wife's Story'. Together they prove that the fairy tale is not only one of the most popular and enduring forms, but a significant and continually developing part of literature.Uncle David's nonsensical story about giants and fairies / Catherine Sinclair --Feathertop / Nathaniel Hawthorne --The King of the Golden River / John Ruskin --The story of Fairyfoot / Frances Browne --The light princess / George MacDonald --The magic fishbone / Charles Dickens --A toy princess / Mary De Morgan --The new mother / Lucy Lane Clifford --Good luck is better than gold / Juliana Horatia Ewing --The apple of contentment / Howard Pyle --The griffin and the minor canon / Frank Stockton --The selfish giant / Oscar Wilde --The rooted lover / Laurence Housman --The song of the morrow / Robert Louis Stevenson --The reluctant dragon / Kenneth Grahame --The book of beasts / E. Nesbit --The Queen of Quok / L.F. Baum --The magic ship / H.G. Wells --The Kith of the elf-folk / Lord Dunsany --The story of Blixie Bimber and the power of the gold buckskin whincher / Carl Sandburg --The lovely myfanwy / Walter De la Mare --The troll / T.H. White --Gertrude's child / Richard Hughes --The unicorn in the garden / James Thurber --Bluebeard's daugher / Sylvia Townsend Warner --The chaser / John Collier --The King of the elves / Philip K. Dick --In the family / Naomi Mitchison --The jewbird / Bernard Malamud --Menaseh's dream / I.B. Singer --The glass mountain / Donald Barthelme --Prince Amilec / Tanith Lee --Petronella / Jay Williams --The man who had seen the rope trick / Joan Aiken --The courtship of Mr Lyon / Angela Carter --The princess who stood on her own two feet / Jeanne Desy --The wife's story / Ursula Le Guin --The river maid / Jane Yolen --The porcelain man / Richard Kennedy --Old man Potchikoo / Louise Erdrich

    Stories of miracles, visions of hell, jokes, fables, and legends, these tales reflect the Japanese worldview during a classic period in Japanese civilization. Masterfully edited and translated by the acclaimed translator of The Tale of Genji, these stories ably balance the lyrical and the dramatic, the ribald and the profound, offering a window into a long-vanished though perennially fascinating culture.