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{"id":16557,"date":"2014-09-09T00:00:00","date_gmt":"2014-09-09T00:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/leithart.level2d.com\/?p=1441"},"modified":"2014-09-09T00:00:00","modified_gmt":"2014-09-09T00:00:00","slug":"once-upon-a-time","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/leithart\/2014\/09\/once-upon-a-time\/","title":{"rendered":"Once Upon A Time"},"content":{"rendered":"\n\n<\/head>

The collection compiled by the Brothers Grimm had a significant role in the development of German Romanticism. Structuralism has many sources, but one is Vladimir Propp\u2019s Morphology of the Folk Tale<\/em>. Fairy tales have been subjected to psychoanalytic treatment (by Bruno Bettelheim) and to archetypal analysis (by Max Luthi). This is not to mention the importance that fairy tales had in the great literature of the past few centuries, not least in Tolkein\u2019s epics. It\u2019s not too much of an exaggeration to say that if you learn to read fairy tales you have learned to read<\/em>.<\/p>\n

Marina Warner offers a highly readable, wide-ranging, and comparatively brief study of the history of fairy tales in her forthcoming\u00a0Once Upon A Time<\/a>. Warner covers tales both familiar and obscure, includes selected stories and illustrations, and talks about how fairy tales have come to expression in other media \u2013 in opera, film, and ballet.\u00a0<\/p>\n

This in fact is one of her recurring themes: Fairy tales don\u2019t stay confined where we tend to leave them, in the children\u2019s section of the library. Fairy tales have aspirations, and with the straightforward, even flat, characters, their repetitive plots, their moralism, their stock of stock symbols, they have provided material for many of the great novelists. There is something of the fairy tale in magical realism, of course, but also, Warner points out, in Dickens and George Eliot.<\/p>\n

Warner\u2019s book is not only informative. It\u2019s also wise, as in this observation on the damage done by the efforts to squeeze traditional tales into contemporary molds of political correctness: \u201cBoth the cultural historical and psychoanalytical approaches to fairy tale have sharpened producers\u2019 awareness of social engineering. Whereas [Lotte] Reiniger could show a jolly frolic in a harem, with Prince Achmed carousing with lascivious Josephine Baker-style houris, the writer and director of Snow White and the Huntsman<\/em> (2012) could not even end the story with a marriage\u2014to the prince or to the pauper. This Snow White (Kristen Stewart of the Twilight <\/em>series) has to remain a lone heroine, a role model for the independent woman\u2014at times in full armour. The rules of genre, which require some resolution to the story, were flouted in the interests of exemplary gender moulding.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/body><\/html>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"