We ask experts to recommend the five best books in their subject and explain their selection in an interview. I don’t think she was interested by Australia particularly, although she loved the birds – the parrots! Unsurprisingly, fairytales vary wildly from continent to continent, country to county. Your next book comes from Italy: Italo Calvino’s Italian Folk Tales (l956), translated by George Martin (published by Penguin in l980). In 2000 it became a Penguin Classic. It’s interesting, in light of what you were saying earlier, that it was commissioned by the publisher to answer the question, ‘Is there an Italian equivalent of the Brothers Grimm?’ Moreover, in fairy-tale studies, the psychological perspective focuses on children’s struggles between positive and negative forces in the self. The renowned child psychologist Bruno Bettelheim (1989), in his influential study of fairy tales, The Uses of Enchantment, claims that “nothing can be as enriching and satisfying to child and adult alike as the folk fairy tale.” He illuminates an understanding of fairy tales which can function as a powerful therapeutic value. By opening the world of fantasy and imagination, children find the life of meaning through fairy tales which can be seen as a way for navigating reality ( Cashdan, 1999), helping them develop the wit and courage needed to survive in a world ruled by adults. Presumably the nature of the teller changed as the form shifted from the feminine art of oral storytelling to a more historically male work of venturing, collecting, cataloguing and editing.

Joosen, V. (2011). Critical and Creative Perspectives on Fairy Tales: An Intertextual Dialogue between Fairy-Tale Scholarship and Postmodern Retellings. Wayne State University Press. I absolutely love her last “Cinderella” – “Ashputtle or The Mother’s Ghost” [which first appeared in 1993, in American Ghosts and Old World Wonders] – in which she takes the Grimms’ motif of the mother returning to help her daughter. She combs her hair and says ‘you’ve worn out my nails’ and says to her ‘now you’re strong and ready to go out into the world on your own’. And so she sends her into the world strong and happy. I think that’s a really beautiful story. One of the features of the Arabian Nights is that there are so many strong heroines – a lot of passionate, strong creative women having every sort of adventure” Lieberman, M. R. (1972). “Some Day My Prince Will Come”: Female Acculturation through the Fairy Tale. College English, 34, 13. The Arabian Nights was a collection of popular, vernacular tales that was actually rather despised by scholars – the Arabic apparently is quite rough, compared to the elegance of the Farsi used in the much better known, more established and highly valued Persian romances of the time. The Arabian Nights tales were considered trifles and not looked after – the same has happened with a lot of early children’s literature. We don’t have a lot of it because no one saw fit to preserve it.

Before we move on to your final book, Naomi Mitchison is another key figure we should mention. The Fourth Pig, first published in 1936, being her best-known work. How important is she to the genre and its modern mutations? Based on popular text sources like Brothers Grimm, Charles Perrault, or Walt Disney, the adaptable nature of literary fairy tales has continually inspired creative writers, artists, and filmmakers to make the responses, reactions, and revisions ( Elliott, 2010; Haase, 1993a; Inge, 2004; Wertag, 2015). Innovation depends on tradition. Working with a plot, a character, images and motifs already familiar to the intended reader or audience, gives freedom to retaliate, protest and reinvent ( Warner, 2014). Feminism approaches ( Cahill, 2010; Haase, 2004; Lieberman, 1972; Warner, 1990), postmodern irony ( Bacchilega, 2013; Joosen, 2011; Smith, 2007), cinema’s visual spectacle ( Elliott, 2010; Hayton, 2012; Moen, 2013), and diverse narration offer the potential to attract widespread appeal. Successful retellings of well-known fairy tales usually bring new insights and transformation, imbuing stories with added significance and meanings in their reception. a b c d e f g h i j k l m n o p q r s t u v w Emerson, Peter Henry (1837). Welsh Fairy Tales and Other Stories. London: D. Nutt. Retrieved 8 May 2018. I think that’s part of what accounts for the tales’ tremendous popularity. Quite a lot of the plot structures expressed the new realities of the world in the early 18th century. One of them, which I really think is very important for our own times, is that money in the Arabian Nights is an omnipresent goal and desire. But money is fantasmic. Money comes and money vanishes; it comes out of a genie-inhabited bottle; it comes out of the ground. And it disappears with no explanation… This is interesting because we’re talking about a period when, for European readers, paper money was more or less invented – it’s the first time in modernity, since the Ming Dynasty’s failed experiments, that money became unpinned from real value.

On the other hand, other voices have queried Disney’s adaptation, losing the meaning and value system attached to the “original” tale. But American academic M. Thomas Inge views the matter from a different standpoint. He argued that Disney’s version does no violence to the traditional patterns of the meaning of the original fairy tale but instead renews and affirms the story’s relevance for another century ( Inge, 2004).Therefore, the féerie is a creative world’s response to represent a visual regime of the nineteenth-century media culture, embody a pre-cinematic sensibility in Charles Baudelaire’s modernist aesthetics that “modern art can dispense with classical art as its authoritative past because the temporal or transitory beauty implicit in the concept of modernity engenders its own antiquity” ( Jauss, 2005). Through a fairy-like aesthetic, the féerie pursue visual pleasures and celebrate a fleeting moment of beauty, rather than engaging with art’s relation to the narrative structure, moral lessons, and social values. Using complex theatrical machinery to achieve its “magic” effect, the féerie inspired the early cinema, notably in Georges Méliès films ( Grøtta, 2015). The successful reception of Shrek represents a considerable step away from Disney’s magic formula, which opens the recent proliferation of fairytale films. It challenges standard notions of the fairy tale and normative standards of beauty and true love and offers playful intertextuality and greater self-awareness of the fairy tale symbol. a b c d e f Croker, Thomas Crofton (1825). Fairy Legends and Traditions of the South of Ireland vol. 1. London: John Murray. Retrieved 6 November 2017. Fairy tales are high fantasy based on stories that are not only not true, but that couldn't possibly be true, while Legends are sometimes perceived as real or plausible. Fairy tales may merge into legends, where the narrative is perceived both by teller and hearers as being grounded in historical truth. However, unlike legends and epics, they usually do not contain more than superficial references to religion and actual places, people, and events; they take place once upon a time rather than in actual times. In a sense, that flies in the face of what happens in literature – literature is at some points a collective expression as a well as an individual act and collective expression can be a force of such enormous good. Remember that many of the worst things in our history were ended because writers wrote about them – slavery for instance. Slave narratives, encouraged by the missionaries, are eloquent and terrifying testimonials but they are also essential literature, playing their part in the drive towards abolition. I don’t believe in art for arts sake.

Wertag, Ž. F. I. T. (2015). Alice through the Ages: Childhood and Adaptation. Libri & Liberi, 4, 213-240. Personally, I find it specious to plump for the French edition because it’s clear that we’re talking about a rattle bag of popular tales which were shaped by some people, by a group of people, we’re not sure who, in the 15th century – we’re not sure about that either, it might have been earlier. Kids and parents alike will love this wonderful read-aloud collection of fractured fairy tales. Incorporating the use of “question” games, Fairly Fairy Talesencourages parent-child interplay that makes for a fantastic reading experience at bedtime or anytime!Fairytale offers a countervailing tradition that says that the artifice of art is the way to talk about truth and to make it something that is tolerable. This is so that you can listen to it or read it and absorb it and, as it were, know it, but it doesn’t totally undermine or horrify you because it’s in this other place: once upon a time. I suppose the reason I’m no longer speaking up for subversion is because we’ve actually seen a lot of very subversive radicalism of the Right. So I don’t think subversion needs encouraging – especially if it leads to giving permission to racism. I mean, both Donald Trump and Nigel Farage are subversives, and now they’ve both met and succeeded. They play that card. a b c d e f g h i j k l m n o p q r s t u v w x y z aa ab ac ad ae af ag ah ai aj ak al am an ao ap aq ar as at au av Wilde, Lady Francesca Speranza (1888). Ancient Legends, Mystic Charms, and Superstitions of Ireland. London: Ward and Downey, Retrieved 5 November 2017. a b c d e f g h i j k l m n Hyde, Douglas (1890). Beside the Fire: A Collection of Irish Gaelic Folk Stories. London: David Nutt. Retrieved 9 November 2017.