Marvels & Tales articles from April 2008

Marvels & Tales archives from April 2008

From the editors.(Editorial)
April 1, 2008... The immediate impetus for publishing a special issue on erotic fairy tales came from a panel devoted to that topic at the 2005 annual meeting of the American Folklore Society (AFS). The four panelists who organized that session--Jeana...

Preface to the special issue on erotic tales.(Critical essay)
April 1, 2008... This was a strange story, one I would have to learn a new language to read, a language I could not learn except by trying to read the story. --Emma Donoghue, Kissing the Witch Folktales and fairy tales are stories about and of desire:...

Innocent initiations: female agency in eroticized fairy tales.(Critical essay)
April 1, 2008... Obscene and bawdy folklore has suffered a long history of neglect and censorship. In 1965 Gershon Legman lamented the "prudery-ridden" reception of Aleksandr Afanas'ev's Russian Secret Tales--a collection of bawdy Russian folktales with a...

Corporealizing fairy tales: the body, the bawdy, and the carnivalesque in the comic book Fables.(Critical essay)
April 1, 2008... Historically, there has been little space in the discipline of folkloristics for the study of the American comic book. This was the case in 1980 when Alex Scobie wrote that folklorists "have not evinced the same degree of interest as has been...

Guilty pleasures: reading romance novels as reworked fairy tales.(Critical essay)
April 1, 2008... Alternately dismissed as "trash," "smut," or "women's pornography," popular romance novels--and their readers--are often criticized, marginalized, and mocked. These novels, however, are the most popular of all genres of fiction. The statistics...

Intellectualizing smut: the role of tradition in Anne Rice's Sleeping Beauty.(Critical essay)
April 1, 2008... In 1983, Anne Rice, under the pseudonym A. N. Roquelaure, published the first of a series of erotic novels about Sleeping Beauty. Her 1983 The Claiming of Sleeping Beauty was followed by Beauty's Punishment in 1984, and Beauty's Release in...

Erotic infidelities: Angela Carter's wolf trilogy.('The Werewolf', 'The Company of Wolves', 'Wolf-Alice')(Critical essay)
April 1, 2008... The erotic always carries with it a certain discontent. Circumscribed by the hegemonic, it can only ever be a profound disappointment so long as it remains mired in heternormative gender conventions, limited by, or to, phallocentric fantasy....

The infernal desire machines in Anne Thackeray Ritchie's Bluebeard's Keys and Angela Carter's "The Bloody Chamber".(Critical essay)
April 1, 2008... "Argument" Between 1866 and 1874 Anne Thackeray Ritchie (1837-1919) published nine revisions of well-known fairy tales. The first four stories ("Sleeping Beauty in the Woods," "Cinderella," "Beauty and the Beast," and "Little Red Riding...

Bloody chambers and labyrinths of desire: sexual violence in Marina Warner's fairy tales and myths.(Critical essay)
April 1, 2008... Introduction: Revisionist Myths and Fairy Tales In August 2004 Marina Warner read fifteen of her favorite poems at the Edinburgh Festival in Scotland. One was a passage from Ovid's Metamorphoses that told the story of the rape of Thetis,...

"Fitcher's [queer] bird": a fairy-tale heroine and her avatars.(Critical essay)
April 1, 2008... I was not raised to think that some day my prince would come. I did not even see the Disney Snow White until I was working on my BA. I didn't identify with princesses. I was two and a half when my grandmother gave me my first folktale book,...

Two tales from Cruel Fairy Tales for Adults.(TEXTS & TRANSLATIONS)(Excerpt)
April 1, 2008... Translators' Introduction Kurahashi Yumiko (1935-2005) was, for more than four decades, one of Japan's most innovative and original writers. Acclaimed for her political satire, experimental novels, and fantastic short stories, Kurahashi...

Politique du conte. Special Issue of Feeries: Etudes sur le conte merveilleux XVIIe-XIXe siecle.(Book review)
April 1, 2008... Politique du conte. Special Issue of Feeries: Etudes sur le conte merveilleux XVIIe-XIXe siecle 3 (2006). 415 pp. This special issue consists of thirteen essays that deal with various political aspects of the French literary fairy tale and...

Logica della fiaba: Fate, orchi, gioco, corte, fortuna, viaggio, capriccio, metamorfosi, Corpo.(Book review)
April 1, 2008... Logica della fiaba: Fate, orchi, gioco, corte, fortuna, viaggio, capriccio, metamorfosi, corpo. By Michele Rak. Milan: Mondadori, 2005. 317 pp. Over the last few decades Giambattista Basile's Lo cunto de li cunti (The Tale of Tales,...

Good Girls and Wicked Witches: Women in Disney's Feature Animation.(Book review)
April 1, 2008... Good Girls and Wicked Witches: Women in Disney's Feature Animation. By Amy M. Davis. Eastleigh, UK: John Libbey, 2006. Distributed by Indiana University Press in the United States. 274 pp. The title of this book is somewhat misleading. It...

Bodies: Sex, Violence, Disease, and Death in Contemporary Legend.(Book review)
April 1, 2008... Bodies: Sex, Violence, Disease, and Death in Contemporary Legend. By Gillian Bennett. Jackson: University of Mississippi Press, 2005. xv + 313 pp., index. Gillian Bennett begins her remarkable book with the following identification: "I am...

Why Fairy Tales Stick: The Evolution and Relevance of a Genre.(Book review)
April 1, 2008... Why Fairy Tales Stick: The Evolution and Relevance of a Genre. By Jack Zipes. New York: Routledge, 2006. 332 pp., bibliography, index, illustrations. In an ambitious and interesting outing, Jack Zipes moves beyond his previous work...

Catalogue of Portuguese Folktales.(Book review)
April 1, 2008... Catalogue of Portuguese Folktales. By Isabel Cardigos with the collaboration of Paulo Correia and J. J. Dias Marques. FFC 291. Helsinki: Suomalainen Tiedeakatemia, 2006. 406 pp. With this catalog, Portugal claims its rightful place in...

Stepmother.(Book review)
April 1, 2008... Stepmother. By Robert Coover. San Francisco: McSweeney's Books, 2004. 90 pp., illustrations. In the first section of this fairy-tale metafiction for adults, Stepmother is attempting with whatever faulty magic she recalls to free her...

Fiabe sgarrupate.(Book review)
April 1, 2008... Fiabe sgarrupate. By Marcello D'Orta. Venezia: Marsilio, 2005. 186 pp. An Italian writer from the Naples area, Marcello D'Orta is well known in Italy, especially for his lo Speriamo the me la cavo (1991), a compilation of fifth-grade...

The Little Mermaid.(Theater review)
April 1, 2008... The Little Mermaid. By Mike Kenny. Dir. Eric Johnson. Perf. Herman Tesoro Jr. and Mary Wells. Honolulu Theatre for Youth. Tenney Theatre, Honolulu. 15 Sept. 2007. Mike Kenny's stage adaptation of Hans Christian Andersen's The Little...