No Go The Bogeyman [Paperback]

Marina Warner's From the Beast to the Blonde was a fascinating feminist meditation on fairy stories and the men and women who tell them; it was both scholarly and a work of creation which changed the way we read.

The attractively illustrated No Go the Bogeyman extends its argument to children. Sometimes fairy stories were meant to scare children into virtue and sometimes to teach them cold-hearted calculation of the moral odds, and sometimes just to soothe them or make them laugh. Fear of the dark is important here--the darkness has always been where adult terrors lurked as well, and Warner is good on the fear of the peasant pagan "other" that underlies many tales. Much fear and much comedy comes from taboos. Children's rhymes and tales often deal in cannibalism and in decay, both to exorcise dread and because children find them genuinely funny. Lullabies soothe partly because of their refrains-- something which comes around reliably is always going to console. In a final, tangential chapter, bananas are at once phallic and tasty, funny, luxurious and grotesque. This is a book full of intelligence and quirky ideas; an important piece of cultural investigation. --Roz Kaveney --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

Ogres and giants, bogeymen and bugaboos embody some of our deepest fears, dominating popular fiction, from tales such as 'Jack the Giant Killer' to the cannibal monster Hannibal Lecter, from the Titans of Greek mythology to the dinosaurs of JURASSIC PARK, from Frankenstein to MEN IN BLACK. Following her brilliant study of fairy tales, FROM THE BEAST TO THE BLONDE, Marina Warner's enthralling new book explores the ever increasing presence of such figures of male terror, and the stratagems we invent to allay the monsters we conjure up. From ogres to cradle songs, from bananas to cannibals, Warner traces the roots of our commonest anxieties, unravelling with vigorous intelligence, originality and relish, the myths and fears which define our sensibilities. Illustrated with a wealth of images - from the beautiful and the bizarre to the downright scary - this is a tour de force of scholarship and imagination.

Marina Warner is a novelist, historian and critic; her fiction includes Indigo, The Lost Father (awarded a Common-wealth Writers' Prize) and the recent collection of stories, The Mermaids in the Basement. Among her acclaimed works on myth, symbolism and fairy tales are Alone of All Her Sex, Joan of Arc, Monuments and Maidens (winner of the Fawcett Prize) and No Go the Bogeyman: Scaring, Lulling and Making Mock (Winner of the Katharine Briggs Folklore Award). She has edited Wonder Tales, six French fairy stories, and in 1994 she gave the Reith Lectures on BBC radio, Managing Monsters: Six Myths of Our Time.

Mary Warner is currently a Visiting Fellow Commoner at Trinity College, Cambridge.