Author: Édouard Laboulaye
Publisher: Princeton University Press
ISBN: 0691181861
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 286
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Book Description
Wry political fairy tales from a nineteenth-century politician that speak to our current times Édouard Laboulaye (1811–1883), one of nineteenth-century France’s most prominent politicians and an instrumental figure in establishing the Statue of Liberty, was also a prolific writer of fairy tales. Smack-Bam, or The Art of Governing Men brings together sixteen of Laboulaye’s most artful stories in new translations. Filled with biting social commentary and strong notions of social justice, these rediscovered tales continue to impart lessons today. Inspired by folktales from such places as Estonia, Germany, Iceland, and Italy, Laboulaye’s deceptively entertaining stories explore the relationships between society and the ruling class. In “Briam the Fool,” the hero refuses the queen’s hand after he kills the king. In “Zerbino the Bumpkin,” the king and prime minister are idiots, while the king’s daughter runs away with a woodcutter to an enchanted island. And in the title story, “Smack-Bam, or The Art of Governing Men,” a superficial prince is schooled by a middle-class woman who smacks him when he won’t engage in his lessons and follows him across Europe until he falls in love with her. In these worlds, shallow aristocrats come to value liberty, women are as assertive and intelligent as men, and protagonists experience compassion as they learn of human suffering. With an introduction by leading fairy-tale scholar Jack Zipes that places Laboulaye’s writing in historical context, Smack-Bam, or The Art of Governing Men presents spirited tales from the past that speak to contemporary life.
Author: Yu-ju Han
Publisher:
ISBN: 1555977669
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 225
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Book Description
A chilling, wildly original novel from a major new voice from South Korea The Impossible Fairy Tale is the story of two unexceptional grade-school girls. Mia is “lucky”—she is spoiled by her mother and, as she explains, her two fathers. She gloats over her exotic imported color pencils and won’t be denied a coveted sweater. Then there is the Child who, by contrast, is neither lucky nor unlucky. She makes so little impression that she seems not even to merit a name. At school, their fellow students, whether lucky or luckless or unlucky, seem consumed by an almost murderous rage. Adults are nearly invisible, and the society the children create on their own is marked by cruelty and soul-crushing hierarchies. Then, one day, the Child sneaks into the classroom after hours and adds ominous sentences to her classmates’ notebooks. This sinister but initially inconsequential act unlocks a series of events that end in horrible violence. But that is not the end of this eerie, unpredictable novel. A teacher, who is also this book’s author, wakes from an intense dream. When she arrives at her next class, she recognizes a student: the Child, who knows about the events of the novel’s first half, which took place years earlier. Han Yujoo’s The Impossible Fairy Tale is a fresh and terrifying exploration of the ethics of art making and of the stinging consequences of neglect.
Author: Jack Zipes
Publisher: Princeton University Press
ISBN: 0691244758
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 272
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Book Description
Fascinating profiles of modern writers and artists who tapped the political potential of fairy tales Jack Zipes has spent decades as a “scholarly scavenger,” discovering forgotten fairy tales in libraries, flea markets, used bookstores, and internet searches, and he has introduced countless readers to these remarkable works and their authors. In Buried Treasures, Zipes describes his special passion for uncovering political fairy tales of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, offers fascinating profiles of more than a dozen of their writers and illustrators, and shows why they deserve greater attention and appreciation. These writers and artists used their remarkable talents to confront political oppression and economic exploitation by creating alternative, imaginative worlds that test the ethics and morals of the real world and expose hidden truths. Among the figures we meet here are Édouard Laboulaye, a jurist who wrote acute fairy tales about justice; Charles Godfrey Leland, a folklorist who found other worlds in tales of Native Americans, witches, and Roma; Kurt Schwitters, an artist who wrote satirical, antiauthoritarian stories; Mariette Lydis, a painter who depicted lost-and-found souls; Lisa Tetzner, who dramatized exploitation by elites; Felix Salten, who unveiled the real meaning of Bambi’s dangerous life in the forest; and Gianni Rodari, whose work showed just how political and insightful fantasy stories can be. Demonstrating the uncanny power of political fairy tales, Buried Treasures also shows how their fictional realities not only enrich our understanding of the world but even give us tools to help us survive.
Author: Jack Zipes
Publisher: Springer
ISBN: 3030211746
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 221
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Book Description
This book provides a comprehensive introduction to and overview of the life and philosophy of Ernst Bloch. Bloch has had a strange fate in the English-speaking world. He wrote his famous three-volume opus, The Principle of Hope, while living in exile in the United States from 1938 to 1940. It was first published, however, in East Germany in the 1950s after he had returned to Europe and became a professor of philosophy at the University of Leipzig. Gradually, his other numerous works became better known and widespread in Europe and scholars in the US and UK started to take note of his works. Yet, he has still remained a somewhat neglected figure in the humanities. While this book does not set out to entirely rectify this neglect, it does offer readers an introduction to Bloch’s works and the opportunity to understand more about the importance of utopian thought. Through an exploration of some of Bloch’s more controversial communist leanings and relationship to the Soviet Union, a study of Bloch’s utopian quest, and even a comparison with J. R. R. Tolkien, this comprehensive study demonstrates just how interesting a figure Ernst Bloch really was, and how his philosophy of hope has laid the basis for secular humanism.
Author:
Publisher: Princeton University Press
ISBN: 069122465X
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 236
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Book Description
A collection of magical Italian folk and fairy tales—most in English for the first time The Pomegranates and Other Modern Italian Fairy Tales presents twenty magical stories published between 1875 and 1914, following Italy’s political unification. In those decades of political and social change, folklorists collected fairy tales from many regions of the country while influential writers invented original narratives in standard Italian, drawing on traditional tales in local dialects, and translated others from France. This collection features a range of these entertaining jewels from such authors as Carlo Collodi, most celebrated for the novel Pinocchio, and Domenico Comparetti, regarded as the Italian Grimm, to Grazia Deledda, the only Italian woman to have received the Nobel Prize in Literature. With one exception, all of these tales are appearing in English for the first time. The stories in this volume are linked by themes of metamorphosis: a man turns into a lion, a dove, and an ant; a handsome youth emerges from a pig’s body; and three lovely women rise out of the rinds of pomegranates. There are also more introspective transformations: a self-absorbed princess learns about manners, a melancholy prince finds joy again, and a complacent young woman discovers gratitude. Cristina Mazzoni provides a comprehensive introduction that situates the tales in their cultural and historical context. The collection also includes period illustrations and biographical notes about the authors. Filled with adventures, supernatural and fantastic events, and brave and flawed protagonists, The Pomegranates and Other Modern Italian Fairy Tales will delight, surprise, and astonish.
Author: Lafcadio Hearn
Publisher: Princeton University Press
ISBN: 0691167753
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 220
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Book Description
A collection of twenty-eight brilliant and strange stories, inspired by Japanese folk tales and written by renowned Western expatriate Lafcadio Hearn Lafcadio Hearn (1850–1904) was one of the nineteenth century’s best-known writers, his name celebrated alongside those of Mark Twain and Robert Louis Stevenson. Born in Greece and raised in Ireland, Hearn was a true prodigy and world traveler. He worked as a reporter in Cincinnati, New Orleans, and the West Indies before heading to Japan in 1890 on a commission from Harper’s. There, he married a Japanese woman from a samurai family, changed his name to Koizumi Yakumo, and became a Japanese subject. An avid collector of traditional Japanese tales, legends, and myths, Hearn taught literature and wrote his own tales for both Japanese and Western audiences. Japanese Tales of Lafcadio Hearn brings together twenty-eight of Hearn’s strangest and most entertaining stories in one elegant volume. Hearn’s tales span a variety of genres. Many are fantastical ghost stories, such as “The Corpse-Rider,” in which a man foils the attempts of his former wife’s ghost to haunt him. Some are love stories in which the beloved is not what she appears to be: in “The Story of Aoyagi,” a young samurai narrowly escapes the wrath of his lord for marrying without permission, only to discover that his wife is the spirit of a willow tree. Throughout this collection, Hearn’s reverence for Japan shines through, and his stories provide insights into the country’s artistic and cultural heritage. With an introduction by Andrei Codrescu discussing Hearn’s life and work, as well as a foreword by Jack Zipes, Japanese Tales of Lafcadio Hearn provides a unique window into one writer’s multicultural literary journey.
Author: Juwen Zhang
Publisher: Princeton University Press
ISBN: 0691214417
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 240
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Book Description
"Although the influence of the Brothers Grimm on folklore in virtually every country in the West has been widely studied, a similar development in the early part of twentieth-century China is virtually unknown. This book collects and translates more than 40 tales selected from the "Lin Lan" series, published in China from the late 1920s to the early 1930s. The pseudonym "Lin Lan" was created in 1924, when a group of three literary stories about the legendary Xu Wenchang (1521-1593), himself the author of many literary works still popular today, were published in a morning newspaper. The success of this first attempt encouraged the creators to publish more folk tales and fairy tales, which ultimately played a major role in the development of modern folk literature in China. The series, written and developed by a Shanghai publisher under the pen name Lin Lan, was divided into three subgenres-minjian chuanshuo (folk legends/tales), minjian tonghua (folk fairy tales), and minjian qushi (comic folk tales)-published in 43 volumes containing nearly one thousand tales in all. The tales were collected the tales from oral storytellers throughout China in response to a call from the publisher, and combined elements of European fairy-tale literature with traditional Chinese narratives"--
Author: Francois-Marie Luzel
Publisher: Princeton University Press
ISBN: 0691252696
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 264
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Book Description
"The French folklorist and Breton-language poet François-Marie Luzel (1826-1895) published several volumes of Breton tales that he collected in Brittany and translated into French. Unlike many nineteenth-century folklorists, including the Brothers Grimm, who relied on correspondents to conduct much of their scholarly research, Luzel and his sister Perrine transcribed nearly all of the tales they collected by spending many winter nights at Breton veillees, social gatherings that took place in houses and cottages throughout Brittany during the winter months of darkness, where communities of family and neighbors would come together to tell traditional stories and share news, gossip, and songs. The folklorist Michael Wilson has translated 29 of Luzel's French tales into English for this volume. Many of these tales have never appeared in English; others have not been translated into English for nearly a century. The tales are organized into a series of five veillees to capture the full context of the tales' original performance at these gatherings. Introductory material provides historical and literary context about Luzel, his surprisingly modern approach to collecting and publishing folk tales, and the Breton culture he worked throughout his life to preserve"--
Author: Michael Rosen
Publisher: Princeton University Press
ISBN: 0691175349
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 328
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Book Description
A collection of political tales—first published in British workers’ magazines—selected and introduced by acclaimed critic and author Michael Rosen In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, unique tales inspired by traditional literary forms appeared frequently in socialist-leaning British periodicals, such as the Clarion, Labour Leader, and Social Democrat. Based on familiar genres—the fairy tale, fable, allegory, parable, and moral tale—and penned by a range of lesser-known and celebrated authors, including Schalom Asch, Charles Allen Clarke, Frederick James Gould, and William Morris, these stories were meant to entertain readers of all ages—and some challenged the conventional values promoted in children’s literature for the middle class. In Workers’ Tales, acclaimed critic and author Michael Rosen brings together more than forty of the best and most enduring examples of these stories in one beautiful volume. Throughout, the tales in this collection exemplify themes and ideas related to work and the class system, sometimes in wish-fulfilling ways. In “Tom Hickathrift,” a little, poor person gets the better of a gigantic, wealthy one. In “The Man Without a Heart,” a man learns about the value of basic labor after testing out more privileged lives. And in “The Political Economist and the Flowers,” two contrasting gardeners highlight the cold heart of Darwinian competition. Rosen’s informative introduction describes how such tales advocated for contemporary progressive causes and countered the dominant celebration of Britain’s imperial values. The book includes archival illustrations, biographical notes about the writers, and details about the periodicals where the tales first appeared. Provocative and enlightening, Workers’ Tales presents voices of resistance that are more relevant than ever before.
Author: Hermynia Zur Mühlen
Publisher: Princeton University Press
ISBN: 0691201269
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 200
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Book Description
A collection of radical political fairy tales—some in English for the first time—from one of the great female practitioners of the genre Hermynia Zur Mühlen (1883–1951), one of the twentieth century’s great political writers, was not seemingly destined for a revolutionary, unconventional literary career. Born in Vienna to an aristocratic Catholic family, Zur Mühlen married an Estonian count. But she rebelled, leaving her upper-class life to be with the Hungarian writer and Communist Stefan Klein, and supporting herself through translations and publications. Altogether, Zur Mühlen wrote thirty novels, mysteries, and story collections, and translated around 150 works, including those of Upton Sinclair, John Galsworthy, and Edna Ferber. A wonderful new addition to the Oddly Modern Fairy Tales series, The Castle of Truth and Other Revolutionary Tales presents English readers with a selection of Zur Mühlen’s best political fairy tales, some translated from German for the first time. In contrast to the classical tales of the Brothers Grimm and Hans Christian Andersen, Zur Mühlen’s candid, forthright stories focus on social justice and the plight of the working class, with innovative plots intended to raise the political consciousness of readers young and old. For example, in “The Glasses,” readers are encouraged to rip off the glasses that deceive them, while in “The Carriage Horse,” horses organize a union to resist their working and living conditions. In “The Broom,” a young worker learns how to sweep away injustice. With an informative introduction by Jack Zipes and period illustrations by George Grosz, John Heartfield, Heinrich Vogeler, and Karl Holtz, The Castle of Truth and Other Revolutionary Tales revives the legacy of a notable female artist whose literary and political work remains relevant in our own time.
