Enhanced descriptions from Syndetics:

From wicked queens, beautiful princesses, elves, monsters, and goblins to giants, glass slippers, poisoned apples, magic keys, and mirrors, the characters and images of fairy tales have cast a spell over readers and audiences, both adults and children, for centuries. These fantastic stories have travelled across cultural borders, and been passed on from generation to generation, ever-changing, renewed with each re-telling. Few forms of literature have greater power to enchant us and rekindle our imagination than a fairy tale. But what is a fairy tale? Where do they come from and what do they mean? What do they try and communicate to us about morality, sexuality, and society? The range of fairy tales stretches across great distances and time; their history is entangled with folklore and myth, and their inspiration draws on ideas about nature and the supernatural, imagination and fantasy, psychoanalysis, and feminism. Marina Warner has loved fairy tales over a long writing life, and she explores here a multitude of tales through the ages, their different manifestations on the page, the stage, and the screen. From the phenomenal rise of Victorian and Edwardian literature to contemporary children's stories, Warner unfolds a glittering array of examples, from classics such as Red Riding Hood, Cinderella, and The Sleeping Beauty, the Grimm Brothers' Hansel and Gretel, and Hans Andersen's The Little Mermaid, to modern-day realizations including Walt Disney's Snow White and gothic interpretations such as Pan's Labyrinth. In ten succinct chapters, Marina Warner digs into a rich hoard of fairy tales in their brilliant and fantastical variations, in order to define a genre and evaluate a literary form that keeps shifting through time and history. Her book makes a persuasive case for fairy tale as a crucial repository of human understanding and culture.

Table of contents provided by Syndetics

• Prologue
• 1 The Worlds of Faery: Far Away and Down Below
• 2 With a Stroke of Her Wand: Magic and Metamorphosis
• 3 Voices on the Page: Tales, Tellers, and Translators
• 4 Potato Soup: True Stories/Real Life
• 5 Childish Things: Pictures and Conversations
• 6 On the Couch: House Training the Id
• 7 In the Dock: Don't Bet on the Prince
• 8 Double Vision: The Dream of Reason
• 9 On Stage and Screen: States of Illusion
• Epilogue
• Index

Reviews provided by Syndetics

Library Journal Review

This enchanting history of fairy tales begins with their origins as stories used to transport readers or listeners to imaginative worlds without intellectual or spiritual authority. These early tales were inspired by ethnographic curiosity and religious confusion, leading to common motifs such as curses and prophecies and characters including ragamuffin orphans and penniless children, which Warner (fellow, All Souls Coll., Oxford Univ.; Stranger Magic) maintains were a reflection of societal anxiety. The author's extensive knowledge of the subject is evident as she analyzes the male-dominated world of early fairy-tale writers such as Hans Christian Andersen and the Brothers Grimm, and how female characters were often portrayed negatively (e.g., the wicked queen, the evil stepmother). Most interesting is her exploration of how the popularity of Charlotte Bronte and romanticism led to the rise of "novels of virtue" and a decline in esteem for fairy tales and the fantasy genre. Dark-hearted morality tales for adults evolved into lighthearted, illustrated tales (e.g., Alice in Wonderland) for children as the faculty of make-believe, Warner contends, became seen as a child's privilege. Later chapters evaluate the Disneyfication of tales including the "awkward heroine," as exemplified in Tangled and Frozen; and satisfactory endings, uncommon in original stories. VERDICT A thought-provoking work for fans of history, sociology, literature, and film. Warner's writing is free of theoretical jargon and will appeal to readers of all types. Stephanie Sendaula, Library Journal (c) Copyright 2014. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.

Publishers Weekly Review

If you're looking for a brief yet thorough overview of the history of fairy tales, you've come to the right place. Rather than sticking to a strictly chronological history, Warner (Stranger Magic: Charmed States and the Arabian Nights) offers a series of chapters focused on different themes associated with fairy tales. For example, "Voices on the Page: Tales, Tellers & Translators" examines the oral tradition, narrative speakers like Mother Goose, and the (sometimes radical) revisions of translators. "Childish Things: Pictures & Conversations" maps the evolution of fairy tale illustrations, while "On Stage & Screen: States of Illusion" highlights new methods of retelling fairy tales, from early-19th-century ballets to 20th- and 21st-century feature films. Warner argues that fairy tales "try to find the truth and give us glimpses of the greater things," not only conveying cultural values and providing clues to possible real-life events, but also allowing us to probe the psyches of previous generations. The thematic organization of chapters gives structure to Warner's arguments, but they feel out of order nevertheless, particularly because the first two chapters are the densest. As a result, the average reader may put the book down before getting to the good stuff. But anyone interested in reading about the history of tales they first encountered in childhood will be edified and entertained. Agent: Amanda Urban, ICM. (Dec.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.

CHOICE Review

Scholars, teachers, and students of fairy tales have been waiting for this terrific book--a veritable Baedeker to fairyland. A widely recognized expert on fairy tales, Warner (Birkbeck College, Univ. of London, UK) now presents a compact history delivered in fluid, bewitching prose. Readers will grasp fairy tales in all their sensuous depth and profound pleasure, due to both the form and the content of Warner's narrative. She opens with a prologue defining six characteristics of fairy tales. The nine chapters that follow introduce key themes (such as metamorphosis, doubles, cannibalism, magic, the woods, talking animals, powerful/evil women) and provide a history of the main tellers of tales (Perrault, the Italians Straparola and Basile, the Grimms, Lang, et al.). Warner also touches on fairy tale films, psychoanalytic and feminist approaches, intertextuality, illustrators, and real-life precursors to characters such as Bluebeard. Each overarching comment on the tropes of fairy tales is followed by multiple examples, demonstrating Warner's encyclopedic knowledge of the genre. Woven into her prose are quotations from Walter Benjamin, J. R. R. Tolkien, Angela Carter, Jorge Luis Borges, C. S. Lewis, and many others. All of this in 180 pages! The 16 illustrations, which are reproduced in (often muddy) black and white, are the only disappointment with the volume. Summing Up: Essential. Lower- and upper-division undergraduates through faculty; general readers. --Elizabeth R. Baer, Gustavus Adolphus College

Kirkus Book Review

This literary and cultural history of our engagement with, mostly, European fairy tales may be short, but it is far from slight. Perhaps best known for her seminal From the Beast to the Blonde (1995), a feminist reading of several European fairy tales, Warner (Stranger Magic: Charmed States and the Arabian Nights, 2012, etc.) presents a thoughtful, discursive and often personal survey of how "fairy tale" has expressed itself over the centuries. She treats her subject as something of a literary force in itself rather than a collection of discrete stories, continuously emphasizing how deeply embedded it is in Western culture. Her exploration ranges far and wide in discerning its origins and influences, from the obviousthe Grimms, Charles Perrault, Marie-Catherine d'Aulnoy, Hans Christian Andersen, Italo Calvino, Angela Carter, Disneyto the less so: the Celtic Mabinogion, Shakespeare, Jane Eyre, Robert Bly and Hayao Miyazaki. Warner touches on commentators as well, discussing the ways such theoreticians as Vladimir Propp, Bruno Bettelheim and Jack Zipes have influenced how we understand fairy tale. This makes for an undeniably dense read, and it is not for beginners, as it presumes some familiarity and requires readers to navigate across centuries, forms and even media. (The maddening design asks readers to physically jump around the book to see illustrations referenced in the text. Readers must decide either to leave Warner's elegant prose and travel to the front of the book for a page number before finding the illustration itself or to do without.) Although the author's erudition is on display on every page, this is no starchy academic text; she frequently inserts her own trenchant opinions, as when she declares that Bettelheim "enrages me as he has done many other lovers of fairy tales," even though she "learned a huge amount from [him]." Both a beguiling appreciation of and a fascinating tour through faery, this offers riches aplenty for lovers of fantasy fiction, children's literature and the tales themselves. Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.

Author notes provided by Syndetics

Marina Warner's award-winning studies of mythology and fairy tales include Alone of All Her Sex: The Myth and the Cult of the Virgin Mary (1976; re-issued 2013), Stranger Magic: Charmed States and the Arabian Nights (2012), From the Beast to the Blonde - on Fairy Tales and their Tellers (1994), Monuments and Maidens: The Allegory of the Female Form (1985), and No Go the Bogeyman: Scaring, Lulling and Making Mock (1998). Her Clarendon Lectures Fantastic Metamorphoses; Other Worlds were published in 2001; her essays on literature and culture were collected in Signs and Wonders (2000), and Phantasmagoria, a study of spirits and technology, appeared in 2006. In 2013 she was awarded a Sheykh Zayed Prize and the Truman Capote Award. She was awarded a CBE for services to Literature in 2008. She is a Fellow of All Souls College, Oxford, an Honorary Fellow of Lady Margaret Hall, Oxford, and a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature and the British Academy.