The Cambridge Companion to Fairy Tales ed. by Maria Tatar (review)
2017; Wayne State University Press; Volume: 31; Issue: 1 Linguagem: Inglês
ISSN
1536-1802
Autores Tópico(s)Religious Studies and Spiritual Practices
ResumoCambridge Companion to Tales. Edited by Maria Tatar. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2015. 252 pp.Maria Tatar's collection of essays by leading fairy-tale scholars serves as a quick and thorough way to become reacquainted with what others are doing in fairy-tale studies field. Conversely, if someone is new to fairy-tale studies, this book contains cutting-edge research that can serve as a fine introduction.The book begins with a brief biography of twelve contributors. This section is followed by a timeline of significant dates in fairy-tale history, starting with publication of Giovanni Francesco Straparola's Pleasant Nights in 1550-1553 and ending with 2004's release of Hans-Jorg Uther's Types of International Folk Tales: A Classification and a Bibliography. Tatar introduces text by explaining why fairy tales endure and are beloved. Her goal in assembling these essays is to allow readers to engage with mutable text of these stories and understand how they might be analyzed: The contributors all focus on a specific or set of tales to model an interpretive pathway and to dig deeply through historical and symbolic layers of fairy tale (7). In twelve chapters that follow, each contributor fulfills that goal in relation to his or her specific area of study Although some contributors focus more on an interpretive style and others on assembling of a collection, each essay deepens reader's understanding of genre.The book begins with Valdimar Hafstein's essay, Fairy Tales, Copyright, and Public Domain, which highlights controversies over copyrighting fairy tales that are part of a country's and not creation of a single author. Hafstein also explores gender issues regarding traditions in that men penned works; they ruled domain of authorship, whereas the place of women was in constitutive outside of that domain, in its residue: folklore (24). A different view of role of women is found in next two chapters. Tatar's essay, Female Tricksters as Double Agents, explores four females whom she sees as tricksters: Gretel from Hansel and Gretel, Scheherazade from Thousand and One Nights, Lisbeth Salander from Stieg Larsson's Girl with Dragon Tattoo novels, and Katniss Everdeen from Suzanne Collins's Hunger Games trilogy. These characters seem consistently united in their double mission of remaking world even as they survive adversity (57). female protagonists in Shuli Barzilai's essay do little to remake world, as they are unconscious. Her essay, While Sleeps: Poetics of Male Violence in Perceforest and Almodovar's Talk to Her, focuses on retelling of Sleeping Beauty tales. Barzilai notes that rape-fantasy imagery of an anonymous fourteenth-century French differs little from a twenty-first-century movie adaptation, and this imagery is consistent throughout most versions of tale.Two lenses for fairy-tale interpretation appear in Chapters 4 and 5. Cristina Bacchilega takes on Snow White and Rose Red and its adaptations using a hypertextual form of intertexuality, in which newer versions of a may not be linked to a specific original type (79). …
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