Why, in other words, fairy tales "stick." Long an advocate of the fairy tale as a serious genre with wide social and cultural ramifications, Jack Zipes here makes his strongest case for the idea of the fairy tale not just as a collection of stories for children but a profoundly important genre.Why Fairy Tales Stick contains two chapters on the history and theory of the genre, followed by case studies of famous tales (including Cinderella, Snow White, and Bluebeard), followed by a summary chapter on the problematic nature of traditional storytelling in the twenty-first century.

    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?

    This updated and expanded second edition includes a new preface and an appendix containing new translations of six tales, along with commentary by Maria Tatar. Throughout the book, Tatar skillfully employs the tools not only of a psychoanalyst but also of a folklorist, literary critic, and historian to examine the harsher aspects of these stories. She presents new interpretations of the powerful stories in this worldwide best-selling book. Few studies have been written in English on these tales, and none has probed their allegedly happy endings so thoroughly.

    Tolkien's creativity and the sources of his inspiration. Shippey shows in detail how Tolkien's professional background led him to write "The Hobbit" and how he created a timeless charm for millions of readers.

    Carole Silver here draws on sources ranging from the anthropological, folkloric, and occult to the legal, historical, and medical. She is the first to anatomize a world peopled by strange beings who have infiltrated both the literary and visual masterpieces and the minor works of the writers and painters of that era.Examining the period of 1798 to 1923, Strange and Secret Peoples focuses not only on such popular literary figures as Charles Dickens and William Butler Yeats, but on writers as diverse as Thomas Carlyle, Arthur Conan Doyle, and Charlotte Mew; on artists as varied as mad Richard Dadd, Aubrey Beardsley, and Sir Joseph Noel Paton; and on artifacts ranging from fossil skulls to photographs and vases. Silver demonstrates how beautiful and monstrous creatures--fairies and swan maidens, goblins and dwarfs, cretins and changelings, elementals and pygmies--simultaneously peopled the Victorian imagination and inhabited nineteenth-century science and belief. Her book reveals the astonishing complexity and fertility of the Victorian consciousness: its modernity and antiquity, its desire to naturalize the supernatural, its pervasive eroticism fused with sexual anxiety, and its drive for racial and imperial dominion.

    Tolkien's On Fairy-stories is his most-studied and most-quoted essay, an exemplary personal statement of his own views on the role of imagination in literature, and an intellectual tour de force vital for understanding Tolkien's achievement in writing The Lord of the Rings .Contained within is an introduction to Tolkien's original 1939 lecture and the history of the writing of On Fairy-stories, with previously unseen material. Here, at last, Flieger and Anderson reveal the extraordinary genesis of this seminal work and discuss how the conclusions that Tolkien reached during the composition of the essay would shape his writing for the rest of his life.

    From Spenser's The Fairie Queene to Wells's The Time Machine to Murakami's 1Q84 it explores the timeless and captivating features of fiction's imagined worlds including the relevance of the writer's own life to the creation of the story, influential contemporary events and philosophies, and the meaning that can be extracted from the details of the work. With hundreds of pieces of original artwork, illustration and cartography, as well as a detailed overview of the plot and a "Dramatis Personae" for each work, Literary Wonderlands is a fascinating read for lovers of literature, fantasy, and science fiction.

    Not since Bettelheim's The Uses of Enchantment has the underlying significance of fantasy and fairy tales been so insightfully and entertainingly mined.

    350 full-color photos, paintings & illustrations.

    Author Daniel Pool provides countless intriguing details (did you know that the "plums" in Christmas plum pudding were actually raisins?) on the Church of England, sex, Parliament, dinner parties, country house visiting, and a host of other aspects of nineteenth-century English life—both "upstairs" and "downstairs."An illuminating glossary gives at a glance the meaning and significance of terms ranging from "ague" to "wainscoting," the specifics of the currency system, and a lively host of other details and curiosities of the day.

    Steeped in folklore and fantasy, it is a rich and diverse account of the part that fairies and fairy stories have played in culture and society.The pretty pastel world of gauzy-winged things who grant wishes and make dreams come true--as brought to you by Disney's fairies flitting across a woodland glade, or Tinkerbell's magic wand--is predated by a darker, denser world of gorgons, goblins, and gellos; the ancient antecedents of Shakespeare's mischievous Puck or J.M. Barrie's Peter Pan. For, as Diane Purkiss explains in this engrossing history, ancient fairies were born of fear: fear of the dark, of death, and of other great rites of passage, birth and sex. To understand the importance of these early fairies to pre-industrial peoples, we need to recover that sense of dread.This book begins with the earliest manifestations of fairies in ancient civilizations of the Mediterranean. The child-killing demons and nymphs of these cultures are the joint ancestors of the medieval fairies of northern Europe, when fairy figures provided a bridge between the secular and the sacred. Fairies abducted babies and virgins, spirited away young men who were seduced by fairy queens and remained suspended in liminal states.Tamed by Shakespeare's view of the spirit world, Victorian fairies fluttered across the theater stage and the pages of children's books to reappear a century later as detergent trade marks and alien abductors. In learning about these often strange and mysterious creatures, we learn something about ourselves--our fears and our desires.

    These "Selected Works provide facsimile editions of her landmark writings, spanning the whole of her publishing career, from 1959 to 1980.

    Book lovers, rejoice! In this love letter to all things bookish, Jane Mount brings literary people, places, and things to life through her signature and vibrant illustrations. Readers will:• Tour the world's most beautiful bookstores• Test their knowledge of the written word with quizzes• Find their next great read in lovingly curated stacks of books• Sample the most famous fictional meals• Peek inside the workspaces of their favorite authorsA source of endless inspiration, literary facts and recommendations, and pure bookish joy, Bibliophile is sure to enchant book clubbers, English majors, poetry devotees, aspiring writers, and any and all who identify as bookworms.

    Norrie Epstein - whose The Friendly Shakespeare was called "spirited, informative and provocative" by The New York Times - strips away the polite veneer of Victorian society to reveal Dickens's life and times in all their squalor and glory, from his childhood days toiling in a blacking factory while his father languished in debtor's prison, to his first visit to the United States, where he was hailed as the greatest living writer. The Friendly Dickens includes an illuminating guide to all of Dickens's works and lively appreciations of characters both major and minor, interviews with aficionados from Patrick Stewart to biographer Phyllis Rose, eye-catching illustrations, copious quotations, a highly opinionated filmography and informative sidebars on almost every page.

     The Industrial Revolution which took place in Great Britain between the middle of the eighteenth century and the middle of the nineteenth transformed British industry and society and made Great Britain the most powerful nation in the world. The Industrial Revolution didn’t happen due to one, single factor but rather to a number of separate yet related developments which interacted to change the world profoundly and completely. Improvements in the production of iron allowed the construction of efficient, reliable steam engines. These steam engines were then used in the production of iron to improve the quality and quantity of iron production even further. Manufacturing became concentrated in factories filled with automated machinery while canals and improved roads allowed raw materials to be brought to these factories and for finished products to be distributed. Inside you will read about... ✓ Transport and the Rise of Global Trade ✓ The Iron Heart of the Industrial Revolution ✓ The Power of Steam ✓ The Lives of Workers during the Industrial Revolution ✓ The Rise of Labor Movements And much more! During the the Industrial Revolution, people became used to the availability of cheap, mass-produced items transported to the point of sale from other parts of the country or even other parts of the world. However, people also became used to living in large cities and working in factories and mills, often for meager wages and in dangerous and exhausting conditions. Progress made a small number of people very wealthy, but it also condemned a large portion of the British population to living and working in danger and squalor. Opposition to the Industrial Revolution came from skilled workers who saw their jobs being replaced by machines and from influential poets who deplored the loss of what they regarded as an idyllic, rural, agrarian way of life. This opposition was brutally repressed, and even those who tried to champion the rights of workers sometimes found themselves under attack by the British Army. The Industrial Revolution changed almost everything about the British way of life, and it spread from Great Britain to most of the developed countries of the world. This is the story of a revolution which continues to affect all of us in the modern world.