The Oxford Companion to Fairy Tales Book

The fairy tale--a story in which the characters, by means of a series of transformations, discover their true selves--is the foundation stone of all modern fiction. The Oxford Companion to Fairy Tales charts the way in which the themes and concerns of traditional oral fairy tales have been adopted and themselves transformed by literary authors. Jack Zipes--editor of two fine anthologies, Victorian Fairy Tales and Spells of Enchantment--provides an excellent introduction, showing a much more subtle and inclusive understanding of the fairy tale than his early polemical books such as Fairy Tales and the Art of Subversion. "The focus of this Companion," he writes, "is essentially on the literary formation of the Western fairy-tale genre and its expansion into opera, theatre, film, and other related cultural forms." This is a wide brief, but Zipes and his collaborators tackle it with zest and authority. The shortcomings--nothing on the spellbinding fairy tales of Rabbi Nahman of Bratslav, for instance--are far outweighed by the virtues. There are definitive short essays on topics such as "Advertising and Fairy Tales" or "Fairy Tales and Poetry"; there are sound entries on individual writers such as Angela Carter, or fairy tales such as Cinderella; and there are overviews of the fairy tale tradition in various cultures. As a one-stop shop for information on the Western fairy tale, this book is a rich and valuable resource. --Neil PhilipRead More