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  • The Cambridge Companion to Fairy Tales ed. by Maria Tatar
  • Mary Sellers (bio)
The Cambridge Companion to Fairy Tales. Edited by Maria Tatar. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2015. 252pp.

Maria Tatar’s collection of essays by leading fairy-tale scholars serves as a quick and thorough way to become reacquainted with what others are doing in the fairy-tale studies field. Conversely, if someone is new to fairy-tale studies, this book contains cutting-edge research that can serve as a fine introduction.

The book begins with a brief biography of the twelve contributors. This section is followed by a timeline of significant dates in fairy-tale history, starting with the publication of Giovanni Francesco Straparola’s The Pleasant Nights in 1550–1553 and ending with 2004’s release of Hans-Jörg Uther’s The Types of International Folk Tales: A Classification and a Bibliography. Tatar introduces the text by explaining why fairy tales endure and are beloved. Her goal in assembling these essays is to allow readers to engage with the mutable text of these stories and understand how they might be analyzed: “The contributors all focus on a specific tale or set of tales to model an interpretive pathway and to dig deeply through the historical and symbolic layers of the fairy tale” (7). In the twelve chapters that follow, each contributor fulfills that goal in relation to his or her specific area of study. Although some contributors focus more on an interpretive style and others on the assembling of a collection, each essay deepens the reader’s understanding of the genre.

The book begins with Valdimar Hafstein’s essay, “Fairy Tales, Copyright, and the Public Domain,” which highlights the controversies over copyrighting fairy tales that are part of a country’s folklore and not the creation of a single author. Hafstein also explores gender issues regarding folklore traditions in that “men penned original works; they ruled the domain of authorship,” whereas “the place of women was in the constitutive outside of that domain, in its residue: folklore” (24). A different view of the role of women is found in the next two chapters. Tatar’s essay, “Female Tricksters as Double Agents,” explores four females whom she sees as tricksters: Gretel from “Hansel and Gretel,” [End Page 167] Scheherazade from Thousand and One Nights, Lisbeth Salander from Stieg Larsson’s The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo novels, and Katniss Everdeen from Suzanne Collins’s Hunger Games trilogy. These characters “seem consistently united in their double mission of remaking the world even as they survive adversity” (57). The female protagonists in Shuli Barzilai’s essay do little to remake the world, as they are unconscious. Her essay, “While Beauty Sleeps: The Poetics of Male Violence in Perceforest and Almodóvar’s Talk to Her,” focuses on the retelling of “Sleeping Beauty” tales. Barzilai notes that the rape-fantasy imagery of an anonymous fourteenth-century French tale differs little from a twenty-first-century movie adaptation, and this imagery is consistent throughout most versions of the tale.

Two lenses for fairy-tale interpretation appear in Chapters 4 and 5. Cristina Bacchilega takes on “Snow White and Rose Red” and its adaptations using a “hypertextual form of intertexuality,” in which newer versions of a tale may not be linked to a specific “original” tale type (79). In her essay, “Fairy-Tale Adaptations and the Economies of Desire,” she discusses variations of the tale and shows how they have been adapted and transformed for modern readers. “Fairy-Tale Symbolism,” by Francisco Vaz da Silva, uses “The Maiden Who Seeks Her Brothers” as a case study for symbolism and allomotifs based on the work of Sigmund Freud and Alan Dundes. Vaz da Silva proposes that the symbols in fairy tales can be linked to those in myth and ritual.

Nancy Canepa focuses on both male and female tricksters in “Trickster Heroes in ‘The Boy Steals the Ogre’s Treasure.’” Canepa does not just refer to traditional male heroes such as Jack and Corvetto; she also focuses on a female trickster, Agatuzza in “The Story of a Queen,” by Giuseppe Pitrè, and uses these examples to highlight that the lines...

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