The Oxford Companion to Fairy Tales [Hardcover]

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 Philip

this is thoroughly researched, impartial, scholarly, wonderfully illustrated and enormous fun The Independent on Sunday --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

From its roots in the oral tradition to the sophisticated, postmodernist reworkings of the present day, the fairy tale has retained its powerful hold over the cultural imagination of Europe and North America for centuries. This book provides an authoritative reference source for this genre, exploring the tales themselves, both ancient and modern, the writers who wrote and reworked them and the artists who illustrated them, and related topics such as film, art, opera, ballet, music and advertising. An introductory overview by Jack Zipes sets the subject in its historical and literary context, and survey articles explore the development of the fairy-tale tradition in individual countries, focusing particularly on the European and North American traditions. With more than 800 entries written by a team of 67 contributors from around the world, this should be a useful companion for anyone interested in literature, film or art, or for anyone who values the traditions of storytelling.

Jack Zipes has been Professor of German at the University of Minnesota since 1989. He is Editorial Consultant for Children's Literature Quarterly and General Editor of Garland's Studies in Children's Literature and Culture.