A Cultural History of Fairy Tales

Abstract

The six-volume set A Cultural History of Fairy Tales seeks to provide a transnational history of the forms of the fairy tale and their adaptations from 500 BCE to the present. Although there are occasional gaps in its coverage of world literature, the set as a whole should prove invaluable to current and future fairy-tale scholars. Each volume could serve as an excellent teaching tool for courses on specific histories of the fairy tale or in a broader examination of themes in the fairy-tale genre overall.Volume 1, A Cultural History of Fairy Tales in Antiquity, edited by Debbie Felton, is especially good in its examinations of ancient analogues to modern fairy tales. Felton's introduction asks whether stories like “Rhodopis” or “Cupid and Psyche” are true fairy tales. The difficulty in agreeing on the definition of fairy tales complicates the task of tracing their history. In the chapter “Forms of the Marvelous,” Graham Anderson examines fantastical creatures, places, and objects in Greek and Roman literature. Emanuele Lelli's “Adaptations” deals with the circulation of fables and fairy tales throughout ancient Greece and Rome. In “Gender and Sexuality,” Serinity Young examines a range of Asian stories beginning with the swan maiden tale type. In “Humans and Non-Humans,” Kenneth Kitchell explores the depiction of animals in Greek and Roman fables. Felton's “Monsters and the Monstrous” section examines mythical monsters from the Near East and the Mediterranean, such as Medusa. Julia Doroszewska and Janek Kucharski's “Spaces” focuses on how borders and distance play into Greek and Roman stories. Dominic Ingemark and Camilla Asplund Ingemark's “Socialization” examines fairy tales as moral messages, particularly in Roman works. Finally, Felton's “Power” looks at societal attitudes toward power in Roman, Mediterranean, and Middle Eastern myths and fables.This volume gathers in-depth examinations of ancient fairy tales, identifying parallels in content to modern equivalents and comparing their relationships to the overlapping categories of myths and fables. While many questions remain, such as the debate over whether fairy tales inspired myth or vice versa, the chapters are deep and illuminating.Noticeably, most of the chapters focus on Greek and Roman works. Certain names quickly become familiar, such as Apuleius, Aesop, Perseus, Gyges, and Psyche, which makes the volume's ventures into other geographical areas all the more conspicuous. Young's excellent piece on gender roles in Asian fairy tales particularly stands out, examining materials touched on by none of the other chapters, such as the Rig Veda. More material like this might have significantly enhanced the six-volume set.Not surprisingly, fairies are the primary theme in Volume 2, A Cultural History of Fairy Tales in the Middle Ages, edited by Susan Aronstein, as the series reaches a point where beings by that name began appearing in written literature. It really is a study of tales about fairies. As in the previous volume, the introduction is dominated by the question of what counts as a fairy tale. Medieval romances aren't always counted, although they contain many fairy-tale tropes. Aronstein's introduction begins with castles. Fairy tales as we know them, although they date from the seventeenth century onward, typically have a medieval setting with castles as a signature fixture. Aronstein concludes that modern fairy tales are a form of medievalism, idealizing the past.Richard Firth Green's “Forms of the Marvelous” examines medieval beliefs in fairies and the antagonistic reaction of the Christian Church, which censored them from narratives of the time. Shyama Rajendran's “Adaptations” presents a possible influence of the One Thousand and One Nights on The Decameron and The Canterbury Tales within traditional approaches that hold that the original collection was known in the West before Antoine Galland's eighteenth-century translation, a view to which alternative narrative routes are beginning to emerge. Lynn Shutters’ “Gender and Sexuality” compares three romances from different time periods, each one about cursed serpent maidens, along with the contemporary ideas surrounding beauty, virtue, and marriage. Sarah L. Higley's “Human and Non-Human” focuses on Melusine, and Christine M. Neufeld's “Monsters and the Monstrous” examines medieval ideas of monsters, from monstrous births to dragons. Helen Fulton's “Spaces” surrounds fairy kingdoms and societies in myth and romance. Usha Vishnuvajjala's “Socialization” goes into social relationships in European, Persian, and Japanese courtly texts. Melissa Ridley Elmes’ “Power” explores how fairies in medieval works disrupt the status quo and serve as commentary on or critique of human power structures.Volume 2 feels more geographically well-rounded than its predecessor, with more locations represented. The focus on fairies in folk belief enables discussion of their connection to gender roles and societal status quo. Melusine is an especially popular subject in the volume, along with associated concepts of otherworldly wives and cursed maidens. This is another solid entry in the series.Volume 3, A Cultural History of Fairy Tales in the Age of the Marvelous, edited by Suzanne Magnanini, covers 1450 to 1650 CE, a period dominated by Italian writers and collectors such as Giambattista Basile and Giovan Francesco Straparola. Accordingly, this volume includes several chapters discussing the tremendous impact the works of these writers had on the fairy-tale canon and the role these tales played in their cultural contexts. Each chapter brings refreshing information to what may easily become well-trodden territory, making Volume 3 an invaluable addition to fairy-tale scholarship.For example, Cristina Mazzoni writes on the themes of gender and sexuality, which are famously complex in the Italian tales in “Gender and Sexuality: Gender and Sexuality in the Fairy Tales of Straparola and Basile.” Davide Papotti examines how the tales both uphold and subvert power dynamics common to the era and also describes the moral ambiguity that runs rampant through the stories in “Spaces: Geographies of the Fairy Tale in Giambattista Basile's The Tale of Tales.” Neither chapter attempts to provide ironclad conclusions on either topic, but, instead, both chapters invite readers to think critically and engage in further scholarship.Volume 3 also includes comparative approaches. In “Monsters and the Monstrous: Witches and Werewolves in Early Modern French and Italian Tales,” Kathleen P. Long usefully compares monstrosity in the Italian texts with French texts of the period and those that followed in the seventeenth century, providing links to subsequent volumes of this collection. Most exciting was N. Ipek Hüner Cora's chapter “Adaptations: Prose Stories Dressed in Ottoman Attire” on adaptations within Ottoman tales of the period, and Laura Nüffer's chapter “Humans and Non-Humans: Animal Bridegrooms and Brides in Japanese Otogizoshi” about animal brides and bridegrooms in Japanese tales. Despite being included in a volume on an era dominated by the Italians, neither of these chapters feels out of place.Every chapter in Volume 3 is immaculately researched, well-written, and accessible—bringing the most contemporary fairy-tale scholarship to the table. Frequently cited are Ruth Bottigheimer, Nancy Canepa, Lewis Seifert, and Jack Zipes, situating this cultural history in direct conversation with these sources in a way that provides new opportunities for scholarship on fairy tales in the age of the marvelous beyond the most controversial debates of the past 20 years.Volume 4, A Cultural History of Fairy Tales in the Long Eighteenth Century, edited by Duggan, covers the period from 1650 to 1800. It treats fairy tales (Charles Perrault), fairyland fictions (Madame d'Aulnoy and other conteuses), and oriental tales (Galland's Mille et Une Nuits and its further translations and derivatives) as a single genre. Calling their named creators “authors” and paying close attention to the tales’ publication histories, Duggan tacitly acknowledges Manfred Grätz's Das Märchen in der deutschen Aufklärung: Vom Feenmärchen zum Volksmärchen (1988), which documents the dissemination in print of French contes de fées to Germany, where they gradually morphed into Volksmärchen.Lengthy fairyland fictions with their parallel fairy realms dominate the “Introduction” and essays of Volume 4, among which Tatiana Korneeva's “Forms of Marvelous” is especially provocative for its fresh and wide-ranging material. “Monsters and the Monstrous: Of Ogre Pyramids, Ruby-Eyed Dragons, and Gnomes with Crooked Spines,” by Kathryn A. Hoffmann, makes the point that the long eighteenth century was the last period in which a woman's sway over magic allowed her to be viewed as powerful rather than as wicked. Hoffmann's essay engages productively with the scholarship of Raymonde Robert, who edited the writings of more than 10 contes de fées authors in the prominent Champion series, Bibliothèque des Génies et des Fées. In “Gender and Sexuality,” Aileen Douglas explores the transformation of sexuality as it moved from d'Aulnoy's “Island of Happiness” to a mid-eighteenth-century English school novel. Rania Huntington's “Slight Channels: Socialization in Tales of Wonder” examines fairy tales as agents of cultural socialization. Magic animals and monsters come under Lewis Seifert's (and also Kathryn Hoffmann's) lens in “The Human and the Non-Human in Fairy Tales,” while Duggan examines the distribution of power by gender and class in fairy and oriental tales in the ancien régime in “Political and Social Power in Fairy and Oriental Tales.” In discussing the slow transformation of a seventeenth-century-published Italian tale via a French publication into a version suitable for folk consumption in Germany, Charlotte Trinquet du Lys in “Fairy-Tale Adaptations in the Long Eighteenth Century” pays particular attention to the brief tales that André Jolles called eigentliche Märchen, while Richard van Leeuwen in “Space and Narrative Strategies in Eighteenth-Century Tales in East and West” and Rania Huntington in “Slight Channels” incorporate Chinese and Japanese tales into the predominantly French canon discussed here.Volume 5, A Cultural History of Fairy Tales in the Long Nineteenth Century, edited by Naomi Wood, is a brilliant collection of seven essays that delve into the multifaceted and often competing cultural trends of an era that Zipes in 2013 dubbed the “golden age” of the fairy-tale genre (in The Golden Age of Folk and Fairy Tales: From the Brothers Grimm to Andrew Lang). Wood's introduction does a beautiful job of painting the English-speaking world of nineteenth-century fairy tales in broad strokes while still introducing the complex matrix of cultural forces to be explored in depth in the collected essays.Volume 5 is an agile, broad-reaching collection that supports a wide range of fairy-tale analyses, particularly in English. Unlike collections of essays that argue a single thesis, these essays provide background on their topics, which makes them particularly useful as a classroom resource for research. The essays are united by more than just time period; Wood's treatment of Romanticism gives the heart of the collection a more unified feel despite the diverse topics and authors. Although the essays primarily reference mainstream fairy-tale authors in the English language with a few notable exceptions, the limitations of these sources are openly acknowledged, and the broad cultural background of the chapters gives this volume wider cultural appeal for fairy-tale studies.Written by a balance of experienced scholars and new voices, the chapters in Volume 5 cover most of the same broad topics as others in the set: genre, adaptation, gender and sexuality, ecocriticism, monsters, space, and society. Each chapter is well-researched with a comprehensive range of critical references. Like the introduction, chapters do not seek to support a single thesis so much as to demonstrate a broad range of ideas and influences. There are no similar resources with such a broad, comprehensive approach to English-language fairy tales in the nineteenth century. The chapter on adaptation specifically opens the study of fairy tales to literary genres like the novel, which are typically overlooked in fairy-tale studies during this era. By expanding the concept of genre, this collection has the flexibility to apply to the fairy-tale and anti-tale narratives embedded in a more diverse range of texts.Volume 6, A Cultural History of Fairy Tales in the Modern Age, edited by Andrew Teverson, opens with Teverson's own erudite overview of the theoretical movements of the past hundred years that have informed popular, creative, and critical understandings of fairy tales. Encompassing Afro-surrealism, Roland Barthes, Walter Benjamin, feminism, Marxism, psychoanalysis, structuralism, surrealism, and more, Teverson coherently surveys how we think about and have thought about fairy tales. His introduction is admirably matched by Kimberly Lau's closing essay on “Power,” which lays bare how Eurocentrism and white supremacy have structured the tools of our study. Lau begins to remedy the lack of race as a heuristic by analyzing Helen Oyeyemi's White Is for Witching (2009). These two essays, which both take a long view of fairy-tale scholarship, are excellent escorts into and out of Volume 6.Between them are other striking pieces, such as Jeana Jorgensen's “Gender and Sexuality” and Jill Terry Rudy's “Socialization: Traditional Wonder Tales and Other Guides for Growing Up.” Noting that the modern age more explicitly references gender and sexuality in fairy tales, Jorgensen cogently analyzes modern understandings of gender and/or sexuality. Rudy considers how wonder tales—including both fairy tales and wonder stories from non-Western cultures—can and have been used by children learning to be in the world. Rudy considers not only psychoanalysis, but also cognitive-affective approaches to understanding how fairy tales and other narratives work to socialize.Curiously, Jorgensen's and Rudy's essays contain the only sustained discussions of Disney in the volume, though only for a few pages. While each essay in the volume acknowledges the Disney behemoth and its overwhelming influence on fairy tales in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, little critical attention is paid to it. Sara Upstone's essay, “Spaces: The Magically Real Spaces of Twentieth- and Twenty-First-Century Fairy Tale,” in particular seems like a missed opportunity. While Upstone discusses representations of space in various twentieth-century fantasy novels, one wonders why the volume does not analyze physical fairy-tale spaces, such as Disney's theme parks or “The German Fairy Tale Route,” mentioned by Mayako Murai in her essay “Adaptation.” Surely, the physical immersion of the fairy-tale consumer/aficionado in a world of fairy tales merits more discussion.Perhaps implicitly, the organization of the six volumes suggests that fairy tales have existed as a genre for 2,500-plus years and that definitions of this genre privilege a tale's constitutive motifs, such as cursed maidens, powerful monsters, impossible tasks, three siblings, and so on. According to this model, fairy-tale motifs take precedence over both the plots (happy or unhappy endings here on earth, or in an afterlife) and the genres within which those motifs reside. Some of these motifs have appeared in literary forms as varied as fable, fairy tale, fairyland fictions, folktale, myth, romance, and adaptations as novels. As a result, the overarching model seems very narrow on one side (i.e., that motifs alone determine fairy-tale-ness) and very broad on the other (i.e., that those same motifs may appear in many disparate genres).Admittedly, A Cultural History of Fairy Tales could not possibly encompass all of the developments of fairy tales over the past 2,500 years. On the whole, the collection contains worthy, enlightening essays in six handsomely produced volumes. Bloomsbury might have seen fit to publish the figures accompanying the essays in color rather than in black-and-white, but that does not detract from the essays’ very real, thoughtful, and elegant analyses. This impressive collection would be a strong addition to any public or academic library.