Victorian Fairy Tales

2016 ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Shortest Path ◽  
Fairy Tales ◽  
Fairy Tale ◽  
Good Deal ◽  
Rudyard Kipling ◽  
Ford Madox Ford ◽  
George Macdonald ◽  
Original Illustrations ◽  
Selection Of

The Queen and the bat had been talking a good deal that afternoon...' The Victorian fascination with fairyland vivified the literature of the period, and led to some of the most imaginative fairy tales ever written. They offer the shortest path to the age's dreams, desires, and wishes. Authors central to the nineteenth-century canon such as W. M. Thackeray, Oscar Wilde, Ford Madox Ford, and Rudyard Kipling wrote fairy tales, and authors primarily famous for their work in the genre include George MacDonald, Juliana Ewing, Mary De Morgan, and Andrew Lang. This anthology brings together fourteen of the best stories, by these and other outstanding practitioners, to show the vibrancy and variety of the form and its abilities to reflect our deepest concerns. In tales of whimsy and romance, witty satire and uncanny mystery, love, suffering, family and the travails of identity are imaginatively explored. Michael Newton's introduction and notes provide illuminating contextual and biographical information about the authors and the development of the literary fairy tale. A selection of original illustrations is also included.

The Irresistible Fairy Tale

2012 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jack Zipes
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Cognitive Science ◽  
Evolutionary Theory ◽  
Literary Theory ◽  
Fairy Tales ◽  
Fairy Tale ◽  
Great Difficulty ◽  
Film Adaptation ◽  
Wide Range ◽  
The World

If there is one genre that has captured the imagination of people in all walks of life throughout the world, it is the fairy tale. Yet we still have great difficulty understanding how it originated, evolved, and spread—or why so many people cannot resist its appeal, no matter how it changes or what form it takes. This book presents a provocative new theory about why fairy tales were created and retold—and why they became such an indelible and infinitely adaptable part of cultures around the world. Drawing on cognitive science, evolutionary theory, anthropology, psychology, literary theory, and other fields, the book presents a nuanced argument about how fairy tales originated in ancient oral cultures, how they evolved through the rise of literary culture and print, and how, in our own time, they continue to change through their adaptation in an ever-growing variety of media. In making its case, the book considers a wide range of fascinating examples, including fairy tales told, collected, and written by women in the nineteenth century; Catherine Breillat's film adaptation of Perrault's “Bluebeard”; and contemporary fairy-tale drawings, paintings, sculptures, and photographs that critique canonical print versions. While we may never be able to fully explain fairy tales, this book provides a powerful theory of how and why they evolved—and why we still use them to make meaning of our lives.

scholarly journals C’era una volta un gufo: incanto e disincanto in The Brown Owl di Ford Madox Ford

2013 ◽  
pp. 49-59
Author(s):  
Rosanna Milano
Keyword(s):  
Fairy Tales ◽  
Fairy Tale ◽  
Ford Madox Ford ◽  
The World ◽  
Art For Art's Sake ◽  
Fairy Story

Although The Brown Owl was a successful fairy tale when first published in 1891, it has since been unjustly forgotten. The Brown Owl was Ford’s first work, written for his sister Juliet to reassure her after the saddest event of their life: their father’s death and the division of their family. The fairy story as Ford calls it, seems to follow the scheme of popular fairy tales but it was born out of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood, which Ford frequented in those years and carries most of the features of the late Victorian literary aestheticism. Art for art’s sake, irony, disenchantment, longing for evasion, are among them. Ford himself later belittled his fairy tales defining them as twaddle, but fairy tale motifs peep out throughout his prose and seem to play an important role in his view of the world.

scholarly journals Sleeping Beauty

2019 ◽  
Vol 67 (2) ◽  
pp. 142-161
Author(s):  
Margreet Boomkamp
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
The Netherlands ◽  
Fairy Tales ◽  
Fairy Tale ◽  
High Standard ◽  
Sleeping Beauty ◽  
Brothers Grimm ◽  
Considerable Success ◽  
Precise Moment ◽  
Very High

The interest in fairy tales grew strongly over the course of the nineteenth century, particularly in Germany, the birthplace of Frans Stracké (1820-1898). Renowned artists made illustrations for popular publications of fairy tales and in the middleof the century characters from fairy tales also appeared in paintings and sculptures. The sculptor Frans Stracké was inspired by this development and in the eighteen-sixties created a Sleeping Beauty and a Snow White. He may have chosen these designs because the sleeping figure offers greater sculptural possibilities, for example in funeral art. He showed Sleeping Beauty at the precise moment she falls asleep, after she had pricked her finger on a spindle. Stracké followed the fairy tale by the Brothers Grimm from 1812, in which the ill-fated event was predicted during the celebration of Sleeping Beauty’s birth. Sleeping Beauty (also known as Briar Rose) was precisely the sort of subject Stracké preferred: he excelled in making genre-like sculpture of a very high standard. This was little appreciated in the Netherlands, whereas in France and Italy practitioners of this type of sculpture enjoyed considerable success. Stracké is credited with introducing contemporary developments in European sculpture into the Netherlands; Sleeping Beauty is a relatively early and typical example.

scholarly journals Fairy-Tale Symbolism: An Overview

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Francisco Vaz da Silva
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Sigmund Freud ◽  
Fairy Tales ◽  
Fairy Tale ◽  
Carl Jung ◽  
Semantic Field ◽  
Cognitive Research ◽  
Max Müller ◽  
Human Psyche ◽  
Wilhelm Grimm

Because the marvelous elements in fairy tales call for an explanation, a cohort of bright minds have pored over the problem of fairy-tale symbolism. Models sharing the nineteenth-century penchant for genetic inquiries have assumed that symbols are the survivals of archaic metaphors. Thus, Max Müller proposed that myths and fairy tales stem from obscured metaphors about solar phenomena; Sigmund Freud speculated that fairy-tale symbolism is the fossilized residue of primordial sexual metaphors; and Carl Jung submitted that symbols express immanent archetypes of the human psyche. Such early approaches assume that symbols convey fixed meanings, and they disregard the effects of folklore variation on meanings. Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm did take variation into account. They conceived Märchen in terms of immanent blueprints incessantly recreated in myriad retellings, but they never tried to make sense of the themes by means of the variants. This path was taken by folklorists influenced by Freud. Alan Dundes proposed to harness tale variants to grasp symbolic equivalences, and he pioneered the study of folk metaphors. But Dundes focused on preset Freudian symbols, a trend that Bengt Holbek followed. To this day, the prospect of addressing fairy-tale symbolism beyond Freud’s assumption of fixed translations remains elusive. Nevertheless, the basic tools are available. Maria Tatar remarked that fairy tales are metaphoric devices, and Claude Lévi-Strauss pointed out that metaphors—in switching terms that belong to different codes—lay bare the broader semantic field underlying each transposition. Müller, Freud, Dundes, Tatar, and Lévi-Strauss variously glimpsed metaphoric patterns in tale variations. The time is ripe to synthesize these intuitions in the light of contemporary cognitive research on conceptual metaphor, so as to address the creative dynamics of symbolism in fairy tales.

5. Childish things

2018 ◽  
pp. 75-85
Author(s):  
Marina Warner
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Scientific Knowledge ◽  
Fairy Tales ◽  
Fairy Tale ◽  
Moral Values ◽  
Printing Technology ◽  
Victorian Era ◽  
Young Readers

Fairy tale hovered as a form of literature between children and adults, but in the Victorian era, the fairy way of writing became a mode of communicating moral values, political dreams, and even scientific knowledge to children. Printing technology made books with pictures one of the most exciting and successful ventures of the nineteenth century, and fairy tales began to be produced deliberately to appeal to an audience of young readers. ‘Childish things: pictures and conversations’ explains that, on the whole, the role of artists who helped create fairy tales has been neglected. It describes the re-writing of fairy tales for this younger audience. Modern fairy tales display a darkening tone.

scholarly journals The Romantic Fairy Tale and Surrealism: Marvelous Non-Sense and Dark Apprehensions

Romantik ◽  
2016 ◽  
Vol 3 (1) ◽  
pp. 33
Author(s):  
Karin Sanders
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Fairy Tales ◽  
Fairy Tale ◽  
Video Art ◽  
Visual Media ◽  
First Century ◽  
Avant Garde ◽  
Salvador Dali ◽  
Hans Christian Andersen ◽  
Selection Of

Romanticism and surrealism shared a fascination with the fairy tale. Yet each was beholden to specific historical moments and particular aesthetic demands. What they wanted were not the same. This article considers  how the romantic fairy tale nevertheless functions as a ‘seed’ for surrealists. Contagions, commonalities, and contrasts between the two movements are briefly outlined. A selection of fairy tales by Hans Christian Andersen is used to demonstrate how a host of visual reinterpretations including lithographs, photo-collages, and video art by twentieth-century surrealists like Salvador Dalí and Max Ernst, and twenty-first-century avant-garde artists like Åsa Sjöström, have reinterpreted the latent possibilities of non-sense in the fairy tale: the marvelous, the absurd, and the dream-like. The article demonstrates that by evoking the dark-romantic sides of Andersen’s works these avant-garde reconceptualizations in visual media predominantly point to shock, violence, war, and ecological disasters.

scholarly journals Ah!Nana’s Fairytale Punk-Comics: From the Comtesse de Ségur’s “Histoire de Blondine, Bonne-Biche et Beau-Minon” to Nicole Claveloux’s “Histoire de Blondasse, de Belle-Biche et Gros Chachat”

2021 ◽  
Vol 5 (1) ◽  
pp. 235-247
Author(s):  
Valentina Denzel
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Gender Roles ◽  
Fairy Tales ◽  
Role Models ◽  
Fairy Tale ◽  
Female Role ◽  
New Perspective ◽  
Second Wave ◽  
Binary Gender

Abstract During its brief existence from 1976 to 1978 the French underground feminist magazine Ah!Nana represented a powerful medium to discuss various topics related to women, sexuality, and discrimination. One of its main goals was to challenge traditional (literary) female role models, including housewives, submissive mothers, and “damsels in distress.” Through the adaptation of fairy tales, a genre particularly suited through its imaginative worlds to challenge preconceptions and norms, Ah!Nana deconstructed and questioned binary gender roles and heteronormativity. This article analyzes cartoon artist Nicole Claveloux’s queer adaptation of the nineteenth-century fairy tale “Histoire de Blondine, Bonne-Biche et Beau-Minon” (Blondine, the Good Doe, and the Gallant Cat) by the Comtesse de Ségur. Claveloux addresses her queer parody to an adult audience, and conveys a new perspective on gender, sexuality, and humanness that is in line with Ah!Nana’s promotion of second-wave feminist standpoints and punk culture. She advocates the exploration of new sexual pleasures, and the disruption of bourgeoisie values, including binary gender roles.

The Cultural Evolution of Storytelling and Fairy Tales: Human Communication and Memetics

2012 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jack Zipes
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Cultural Evolution ◽  
Fairy Tales ◽  
Fairy Tale ◽  
Social Institutions ◽  
Human Communication ◽  
Cultural Artifacts ◽  
The Enlightenment ◽  
Interdisciplinary Approaches ◽  
New Research

This chapter expands on the author's most recent books, Why Fairy Tales Stick and Relentless Progress, and includes new research by scholars interested in interdisciplinary approaches to cultural evolution. It clarifies why and how tales were created and told, and formed the basis of culture. It suggests that oral tales were imitated and replicated as memes in antiquity to form the fiber of culture and tradition. Taxonomies in the nineteenth century were established in response to recognizable features of tales as well as to organize and order types of stories. “Modern” genres originated during the Enlightenment and are basically social institutions that have defined cultural artifacts and patterns, divided them rationally into disciplines, and established rules and regulations for their study. In many ways, the fairy tale defies such definition and categorization.

Hyping the Grimms’ Fairy Tales

2014 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jack Zipes
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Fairy Tales ◽  
Fairy Tale ◽  
Culture Industry ◽  
Reading Public ◽  
Brothers Grimm ◽  
The Media

This chapter discusses how the Grimms became involved in hyping their own tales to change their reception at the beginning of the nineteenth century. It first considers some of the theoretical aspects of hyping and the particular role hyping plays in the media paratexts of the culture industry. Hereafter the chapter reviews how the Brothers Grimm changed the format and scope of their tales, primarily under the influence of Taylor's 1823 translation, German Popular Stories, to make their tales more accessible to the general reading public in Germany. Lastly, the chapter examines some recent filmic adaptations of fairy tales and considers whether the hyping of these films detracts from the value of the fairy-tale genre and storytelling in general.

scholarly journals The Irascible Heroine in E.T.A. Hoffmann’s Fairy Tale, “Princess Brambilla: A Capriccio in the Style of Jacques Callot”

2016 ◽  
Vol 9 (1) ◽  
pp. 60
Author(s):  
Val Scullion ◽  
Marion Treby
Keyword(s):  
Fairy Tales ◽  
Fairy Tale ◽  
Historical Context ◽  
Normative Values ◽  
Gender Differentiation ◽  
Patriarchal Ideology ◽  
Wide Range ◽  
Social Discourses ◽  
The Relationship ◽  
Selection Of

This socio-linguistic study of a selection of E.T.A. Hoffmann’s literary fairy tales, particularly “Princess Brambilla: A capriccio in the style of Jacques Callot” (1820), focuses on his revisioning of contemporary social discourses on gender. Conventionally, these discourses depicted men as dominating and women as subservient, whereas Hoffmann’s wide range of fairy-tale characters subverts a strict gender differentiation. The authors’ use of a Bakhtinian method to disentangle interdependent narrative strands in this carnivalesque fairy tale reveals its lack of a single patriarchal ideology. By exploring the relationship between “Brambilla”’s unconventional heroine Giacinta-Brambilla, and unheroic hero Giglio-Chiapperi, their argument demonstrates how Giacinta’s dominance facilitates Giglio’s developing self-knowledge. Through examining differing critical interpretations of Hoffmann’s presentation of women, the authors argue that, set against the normative values of his time, “Princess Brambilla” takes a subversive position. In short, Hoffmann’s fairy tales, in their historical context, offered a new way to interpret gender.

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