A Short Review of Once Upon a Time: A Short History of Fairy Tale, by Marina Warner
Once Upon a Time: A Short History of Fairy Tale by Marina WarnerMy rating: 4 of 5 stars
A fine addition to the corpus of fairy tale scholarship, and I recommend it, especially to those who are just embarking on this academic and intellectual adventure--and to those who just like fairy tales. I am reading as someone who belongs to both groups, and a third, one of those who is exploring the fairy tale through retellings.
The chapter titles almost do the job of discussing the book's value and purpose and intended audiences: The Worlds of Faery: Far Away and Down Below; With a Touch of Her Wand: Magic & Metamorphosis; Voices on the Page: Tales, Tellers, & Translators; Potato Soup: True Stories/Real LIife ...you get the idea.
A few sample passages from this book written by an award-winning scholar of fairy tales and mythology (including the superb From the Beast to the Blonde: On Fairy Tales and their Tellers, 1994) would also do the job:
".... the Ocean of Story ... encircles the earth since recorded time... We swim, float, or navigate this fluid and marvelous body of water as a matter of course; mass media television, game shows, video games, and every kind of popular entertainment trawl it daily to bring up plots and characters, animals and motifs" (xx).
"... the historical reality that can be excavated from fairy tales does not carry the memory of extreme horrors, specific tragedies, or individuals, but rather dramatizes ordinary circumstances, daily sufferings, needs, desires-and dangers especially of dying young" (91).
"This is the way fairy tales should be: like the splinter from the spindle, they can enter you and remain for a hundred years of dreams" (112).
"Fairy tales are stories that try to find the truth adn give us glimpes of greater things--this is the principle that underlies their growing presence in writing, art, cinema, dance, song" (178).
I could go on.
Recommended. Excellent list of titles for further reading.
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