Marvels & Tales articles from October 2004

Marvels & Tales archives from October 2004

From the editor.(Editorial)
October 1, 2004... As Guest Editor Ulrich Marzolph's preface explains, this special issue of Marvels & Tales takes part in celebrating another anniversary in the field of fairy-tale studies. A special focus on the Arabian Nights is long overdue in the pages of...

Preface to the special issue on "The Arabian Nights: Past and Present".(Editorial)
October 1, 2004... As of 2004, three hundred years have passed since the introduction of the most influential work of Oriental fiction to a Western audience. Published in 1704 for the first time in a European language, Antoine Galland's Les Mille et une Nuits...

Galland's "Ali Baba" and other Arabic versions.(Critical Essay)
October 1, 2004... The text of reference in which the tale of Ali Baba appears for the first time goes back, theoretically, to the ninth century. It was around this period that a Persian book called Hazar Afsanag (A Thousand Tales) was translated into Arabic,...

Siblings in Alf laylah wa-laylah.(Critical Essay)
October 1, 2004... Introduction A folk narrative may be seen as a description of life and living--real or fictitious (El-Shamy, Folk Traditions 1: xiii). Social relations, especially among family members, constitute a major part of the tales. Thus, the...

Shahrazad is one of us: practical narrative, theoretical discussion, and feminist discourse.(Critical Essay)
October 1, 2004... Setting out to investigate the frame-story of the Nights and its impact on Eastern and Western literature, I was unaware of the wealth of studies that have been published. They range from strictly philological research to postmodern literary...

Slave-girl lost and regained: transformations of a story.(Critical Essay)
October 1, 2004... A story found in many forms in Arabic has the following basic structure: (1) A man owns a slave-girl. Usually, the man is young and wealthy, and the girl both beautiful and accomplished, especially in singing and playing. It is...

Creativity, random selection, and pia fraus: observations on compilation and transmission of the Arabian Nights.(Critical Essay)
October 1, 2004... The earliest proof of the very existence of the work entitled Alf laylah is the paper fragment published by Nabia Abbott. The last decisive act in the text history of the work now commonly known as The Thousand and One Nights (henceforth:...

Framing in oral narrative.(Critical Essay)
October 1, 2004... "I'll tell you what I'll do," said the smith. "I'll fix your sword for you tomorrow, if you tell me a story while I'm doing it." The speaker was an Irish storyteller in 1935, framing one story in another (O'Sullivan 75, 264). The moment...

Political thought in The Thousand and One Nights.(Critical Essay)
October 1, 2004... It is a preposterous title, of course. Should we also look for political thought in Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs? Or in the slapstick films of Laurel and Hardy? Or in Superman comics? Surely, whereas politics is "the art of the possible,"...

Further considerations on Galland's Mille et une Nuits: a study of the tales told by Hanna.(Critical Essay)
October 1, 2004... Published between 1704 and 1717, the first European translation of the collection of stories commonly known in English as The Arabian Nights, is the work of the French Orientalist scholar Antoine Galland (1646-1715). His twelve-volume...

The teacher and the taught: structures and meaning in the Arabian Nights and the Panchatantra.(Critical Essay)
October 1, 2004... The Arabian Nights and the Panchatantra are both works of Asian origin, and both have exercised their power over folkloric and literary imagination across continents for many centuries. The Panchatantra has been considered to be the older of...

Jacques Cazotte, his Hero Xailoun, and Hamida the Kaslan: a unique feature of Cazotte's "Continuation" of the Arabian Nights and a newly discovered Arabic source that inspired his novel on Xailoun.(Critical Essay)
October 1, 2004... Jacques Cazotte (1719-92) was an eighteenth-century French writer who deserves to be ranked among the more distinguished figures of French literature and, according to some critics, even among those occupying the front ranks. He is remembered...

Old Deccan Days, or Hindoo Fairy Legends.(Book Review)
October 1, 2004... Old Deccan Days, or Hindoo Fairy Legends. By Mary Frere. Edited with an introduction by Kirin Narayan. ABC-CLIO Classic Folk and Fairy Tales. Santa Barbara: ABC-CLIO, 2002. 261 pp. Folktales from Northern India. By William Crooke and Pandit...

Popular Tales and Fictions: Their Migrations and Transformations.(Book Review)
October 1, 2004... Popular Tales and Fictions: Their Migrations and Transformations. By W. A. Clouston. Edited with an introduction by Christine Goldberg. Santa Barbara, CA: ABC-CLIO, 2002. xxxi + 585 pp. Narrative has made something of a comeback in recent...

The Annotated Classic Fairy Tales.(Book Review)
October 1, 2004... The Annotated Classic Fairy Tales. Edited with an introduction and notes by Maria Tatar Translations by Maria Tatar New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 2002. xxi + 445 pp. The Annotated Classic Fairy Tales is such a gorgeous book that it is...

Italian Popular Tales.(Book Review)
October 1, 2004... Italian Popular Tales. By Thomas Frederick Crane. Edited and introduced by Jack Zipes. New York: Oxford University Press, 2003. 317 pp. A deteriorating copy of Thomas E Crane's Italian Popular Tales (1885) had long sat on my bookshelf...

Pashtun Tales from the Pakistan-Afghan Frontier.(Book Review)
October 1, 2004... Pashtun Tales from the Pakistan-Afghan Frontier. Edited by Aisha Ahmad and Roger Boase. London: Saqi Books, 2003. 379 pp. with folkloristic analysis, glossary, index of tale types, index of folk motifs, sketches. The book under review is a...

Fairy Godfather: Straparola, Venice, and the Fairy Tale Tradition.(Book Review)
October 1, 2004... Fairy Godfather: Straparola, Venice, and the Fairy Tale Tradition. By Ruth B. Bottigheimer Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2002. viii + 156 pp. Fairy Godfather is a monographic essay on Giovanni Francesco Straparola da...

Metamorphosis: the Dynamics of Symbolism in European Fairy Tales.(Book Review)
October 1, 2004... Metamorphosis: The Dynamics of Symbolism in European Fairy Tales. By Francisco Vaz da Silva. New York: Peter Long, 2002. 278 pp. In Metamorphosis, Francisco Vaz da Silva synthesizes folkloristic, psychoanalytic, semiotic, and...

Pregnant Fictions: Childbirth and the Fairy Tale in Early-Modern France.(Book Review)
October 1, 2004... Pregnant Fictions: Childbirth and the Fairy Tale in Early-Modern France. By Holly Tucker Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 2003. 213 pp. Pregnant Fictions offers a fascinating look at the intersections of medical discourse and fairy...

National Dreams: the Remaking of Fairy Tales in Nineteenth-Century England.(Book Review)
October 1, 2004... National Dreams: The Remaking of Fairy Tales in Nineteenth-Century England. By Jennifer Schacker. Philadelphia: University of Philadelphia Press, 2003. 198 pp. Folklorists commonly agree that, in the nineteenth century, England--contrary...

The Emperor's Old Groove: Decolonizing Disney's Magic Kingdom.(Book Review)
October 1, 2004... The Emperor's Old Groove: Decolonizing Disney's Magic Kingdom. Edited by Brenda Ayres. New York: Peter Long, 2003. 203 pp. The last decade has seen a proliferation of critical collections focused on the Disney empire, signaling, perhaps,...

The Poets' Grimm: 20th Century Poems from Grimm Fairy Tales.(Book Review)
October 1, 2004... The Poets' Grimm: 20th Century Poems from Grimm Fairy Tales. Edited by Jeanne Marie Beaumont and Claudia Carlson. Ashland, OR: Story Line Press, 2003. 287 pp. This anthology of twentieth-century fairy-tale poems is a publishing desideratum...

The Hard Facts of the Grimms' Fairy Tales.(Book Review)
October 1, 2004... The Hard Facts of the Grimms' Fairy Tales. By Maria Tatar. Expanded second edition. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2003. xxxvi + 325 pp. The fairy-tale scholarship that emerged in the 1970s and 1980s is remarkable in both its...

Fairy Tale Review.(Professional Notices)(Brief Article)
October 1, 2004... Fairy Tale Review is a new biannual journal devoted to the contemporary literary fairy tale. The journal will publish original high-quality poetry, prose (including short stories, novellas, and drama), and visual art; it will also include...

Feeries.(Professional Notices)(new journal)(Brief Article)
October 1, 2004... Feeries is a new, annually-published journal devoted to the French marvelous tale (le conte merveilleux) from the seventeenth to the nineteenth centuries. The journal's scope encompasses the history of the genre from its "invention" up until...

14th Congress of the International Society for Folk Narrative Research.(Professional Notices)(Brief Article)
October 1, 2004... The 14th Congress of the International Society for Folk Narrative Research (ISFNR) will be held 26-31 July 2005, in Tartu, Estonia. The Society, founded in 1958, supports and encourages scholarly research in folklore. The Congresses are held in...