Fairytales can be seen as formulaic, but these formulas provide the bones for modern writers to fill in as they please; adaptations of classic fairytales are still making bestseller lists and hitting the box office every few months, showing how versatile these classic tales can be, as Lincoln Michel points out over at the Guardian. The nondescript […]
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Jennifer Whitaker discusses her new collection The Blue Hour, persona poems, the violence in fairy tales, and writing about sexual abuse.
...moreAt Lit Hub, Tobias Carroll discusses the enduring appeal of strange fairy tales, and their influence on contemporary fiction: They remind us that the larger world is inherently complex, that the lessons imparted by stories of wicked creatures and good-hearted men and women rarely apply in our world. Bodies that change in bizarre ways, shifting […]
...more(n.); the moral appended to the end a story or fable; from the Greek epi (“upon”) + muthos (“story, fable”) “Once upon a time there was a princess who went out into the forest and sat down at the edge of a cool well.” —Excerpt from “The Frog King, or Iron Henry” in Jack Zipes’s Original […]
...moreThe Guardian looks at a new English translation of the first edition of the Grimm brothers’ fairy tales and finds stories that are much less child-friendly than the ones we know today.
...moreBritish art giant David Hockney is best known for pop-art paintings like A Bigger Splash, but he has also worked in many other mediums—including, it seems, illustrations for children’s books. Over at Brain Pickings, Maria Popova highlights a recently reissued collection of fairy tales from the Brothers Grimm with striking, discomfiting drawings by Hockney. As Popova […]
...moreWhile the Brothers Grimm were collecting fairytales and folklore around Germany, another historian was doing the same thing. His name was Franz Xaver von Schönwerth, and the 500 fairytales he recorded in Bavaria were only recently uncovered. The Guardian has more on the multitude of new bedtime stories, including a translation of one called “The Turnip Princess.”
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