New Tales for Old: Folktales as Literary Fictions for Young Adults (review)

This book, written by a professional story-teller/research librarian and a professor of children's literature, is primarily designed for librarians and the educators of "young adults" (i.e., high school students and undergraduate college students). But it has much of interest to the folklore student as well. Essentially, the authors have taken eight of the most popular and well-known folktales, explained their histories in oral tradition and literature, condensed some of the most important critical interpretations about each tale, and offered their own critical views of recent fiction (novels, short stories, poetry, and film) that uses the tales as a basis for plot. They also give teaching ideas for using the literary tales in the classroom. While folklorists, used to exhaustive studies of folktale types and motifs, may find the overviews of the different versions of the tales superficial, educators less familiar with the endless variations of these tales around the world will receive a good introduction to the idea of the widespread occurrence of the tales and the idea of traditional motifs (the authors explain, and liberally apply, Aarne-Thompson tale-type and motif numbers). What the folklore student and scholar may gain most from this volume are the references to, and interpretation of, the recent applications in fiction. After all, we are very familiar with finding versions of folktales via tale-type and motif indexes, but we are sometimes not as conversant as we might be with recent literature that reworks these tales and motifs. I would recommend the book as a reference tool for anyone involved in teaching narrative to "young adults" any "young" (or young at heart) adults engaged in folktale research.