Bruno Bettelheim has spent his lifetime working on behalf of children and their secure upbringing. Having survived two concentration camps, he came to the United States and created a new therapeutic environment to help psychotic children survive their illnesses. He has frequently written about that experience; now he turns to a seemingly different subject, the fairy tale. He perceives an underlying continuity in his work, maintaining that the familiar fairy tale is, in fact, an art form, delineating the ultimate goal of child and man alike, a life with meaning. He indicates why other children's stories fail to attain this goal, and at the same time, why fairy tales themselves have fallen into disuse. In discussing their virtues, the author employs his extensive clinical experience, his engaging style, and, of course, the fairy tales themselves. Psychoanalytic assumptions constitute the organizing principle of his book, its consistency, and its occasional shortcomings;

The Uses of Enchantment: The Meaning and Importance of Fairy Tales

'In her right hand she bore a trumpet, in her left an olive branch...' :performance space and the early modern female wind player

If a critique of everyday life is to become a serious undertaking, virtually everything we experience needs to be subjected to careful and critical scrutiny. Even fairy tales. Like so much else in modern culture, these tales may not be as innocuous as they appear. To the extent that the culture industry has appropriated them and uses their motifs to manipulate consciousness or shape behavior, especially in children, fairy tales may be more effective as instruments of social control than one would think. Perhaps for this reason the study of these tales is too important to be left to folklore aficionados or specialists in children's literature.

Breaking the Magic Spell: Radical Theories of Folk and Fairy Tales

Reviewed Medium: book
 Authors: Elizabeth Wanning Harries
 Year: 2001
 Pages: xiv + 216
 Publisher: Princeton University Press
 Prices: $18.75 US

Twice Upon a Time: Women Writers and the History of the Fairy Tale

Reviewed Medium: book
 Authors: Nancy L. Canepa
 Year: 1999
 Pages: 336
 Publisher: Wayne State University Press
 Prices: $39.95 US(hard cover).

From Court to Forest: Giambattista Basile's Lo cunto de li cunti and the Birth of the Literary Fairy Tale

Early Modern Queens and the Intersection of Fairy Tales and Fact The Queen's (In)Fertile Body and the Body Politic Maternal Monstrosities: Early Modern Queens and the Reproduction of Heirs and Errors Succession The Fairest of Them All: Queenship and Beauty The Queen's Wardrobe: Dressing the Part The Queen's Body: Promiscuity at Court

Fairy Tale Queens: Representations of Early Modern Queenship

When Aimee Bender's fiction is described, the designation "fairy tale" frequently appears along with recurring descriptors: magical, surreal, phantasmagoric, bizarre. One critic refers to Bender's short stories as "contemporary fairy tales, cushioned by goofy humor and a deep tenderness for her characters" (Press 14), and another writes that her first novel "reads like a Brothers Grimm fairy tale overlaid with the futuristic alienation of Philip K. Dick" (R. Johnson 36). 1 Bender herself acknowledges her affinity with fairy tales, often citing the Brothers Grimm and Hans Christian Andersen as formative literary influences. In 2004 she told an interviewer, "1 feel like somewhere along the line 1 ate fairy tales, 1 ingested and digested them, and now they're part of my whole person" (S. Johnson 22). Yet Bender's work - two novels, An Invisible Sigi of My Own (2000) and The Particular Sadness of Lemon Cake (2010); two short story collections, The Girl in the Hammable Shirt (1999) and Willful Creatures (2006); and miscellaneous stories - does not overtly call attention to its kinship with the fairy-tale tradition. Readers expecting stories that deliberately evoke and subversively rework familiar tale types along the lines of Angela Carter, Robert Coover, Margaret Atwood, or A. S. Byatt will not find them in Bender's fiction. This late twentieth-century group of writers, the "Carter generation" as Stephen Benson refers to them, signal blatantly that they are entering fairy-tale territory through their titles, direct revision of familiar plot and character types, or explicit interfacing with previous fairy-tale iterations. Bender's work, on the other hand, is Imbued with a fairy-tale ethos, but its presence is more obliquely felt, The fairy-tale works of Bender's predecessors offer, for example, a radically feminist Uttle Red Riding Hood, an ecocritically alert revision of "Beauty and the Beast," and a sexualized and predatory Snow White, but these wildly innovative challenges to the politics and aesthetics of canonical tales nonetheless remain firmly within the circumscribed and recognizable realm of the fairy-tale genre. Benders agenda is different: her purpose is not to parody fairy-tale cliches or to interrogate its ideological underpinnings, particularly in the areas of gender and class. Rather, Bender frequently but sporadically appropriates fairy-tale motifs and structural patterns to explore how humans negotiate their strange and incomprehensible worlds: a magical dress serves as a cover for a woman~ insecurity and self-loathing, an amputation points to a character~ emotional fragility, a child born with a grotesque malformation becomes an occasion for exposing cruelty and alienation. Because Bender is a relative newcomer in contemporary fiction, literary criticism of her work has not yet caught up to her broader acclaim. In his recent Relentless Progress, Jack Zipes mentions Bender as an emerging writer who deserves more attention, and he credits her with avoiding the trap of producing formulaic fiction "for the market" like so much adaptive fairy-tale writing. Zipes describes Bender as a writer for whom "the fairy tale has become more charged with neurotic intensity and more layered" and whose short stories combine "elements of the folk tale, magic realism, the grotesque, and the macabre that ruptures readers' expectations" (130). In this essay I further explore the "neurotic" and "layered" additions that Bender makes to the fairytale corpus. These additions fall into four broad categories: appropriation of conventional form; intertextual use of common themes and motifs; an exploradon of the fairy tales paradigm of the family dynamic; and the invention of fresh autonomous tales. In these ways Bender reworks familiar fairy-tale elements into fiction that charts the emotional disconnection her characters experience in an overwhelming and absurd postmodern landscape. The Fairy Tale and Conventions of Form Benders stories invite immediate association with the fairy tale because they appear to emulate its formulaic conventions: her tales are typically brief, they eschew complex characterization, and they posit their sense of the fantastic squarely and unapologetically within the realm of fairy-tale logic. …

Aimee Bender's Fiction and the Intertextual Ingestion of Fairy Tales

Fairy Tale Queens

Beloved, virtuous, and capable queens are plentiful in early modern history and literature, but it is the figure of the wicked queen that has an especially tenacious hold on our imaginations. Nefarious female monarchs, who exploit their power, dominate the men who surround them, compete ruthlessly with other women, and relish their horrific deeds—these make for colorful narratives, and thus the evil queen type is perpetuated in popular and literary culture. While the wicked queen’s brand of evil manifests itself in various ways, a recurrent site of treachery is in her association with poison.

Poisoning Queens in Early Modern Fact and Fiction

Desdemona is a collaboration among writer Toni Morrison, theater director Peter Sellars, and musician Rokia Traore. Morrison's text, a series of monologues and dialogues spoken by an actress who plays Desdemona and channels various other characters, alternates with songs written and performed by Traore, a renowned Malian singer and composer. This hybrid narrative of words and music insists upon a radical rereading of Othello as it pushes against aesthetic, generic, and ideological boundaries. Both prequel and sequel to Shakespeare's play, this work expands and re-envisions the story of his tragic heroine by imagining Desdemona's girlhood as well as her afterlife. Desdemona tells us her story from the other side of the grave, the "undiscovered country" Hamlet famously evokes. Morrison's desire to create a more significant role for Desdemona came from her sense that Shakespeare's tragic heroine has been given insufficient attention, particularly in performances, a neglect that can be located in the critical tradition as well. Morrison's reconstruction of Desdemona as a young girl is a rich lyrical narrative in itself, but as a creative appropriation it explicitly positions itself in dialogue with Shakespeare's articulation of Desdemona and with a tradition of critical and performative interpretations of her character.

Jo Eldridge Carney

Papers

Fairy Tale Queens: Representations of Early Modern Queenship

Aimee Bender's Fiction and the Intertextual Ingestion of Fairy Tales

Fairy Tale Queens

Poisoning Queens in Early Modern Fact and Fiction

"Being Born a Girl": Toni Morrison's Desdemona