Showing papers in "Marvels and Tales in 2004"

Abstract: In 1989, Disney's little mermaid first asked the musical question, "When's it my turn?" She asked it again in 1996, when her movie was re-released in theaters, and she continues to ask it, frequently, in many of our living rooms. Never has a protagonist had so many turns to demand a turn: yet, seemingly, she remains unsatisfied. If even the heroine in a Disney "girls' movie" does not enjoy being a girl, how must the girls watching her feel about it? Behind this gender question lurks a larger political one. If Ariel's feminist rhetoric is undercut by more conservative elements in her movie, so is the environmentalism of The Lion King, the multiculturalism of Pocahontas, the valuing of difference in The Hunchback of Notre Dame-in short, all the quasi-liberal sentiments that focus groups have no doubt caused to grace the surface of the last decade's Disney features. Ideology in Disney is a much vexed question, and I will not attempt here to untangle a knot which began forming for critics when Walt first denied having any politics back in the thirties, and which has only grown in mass and complexity since his death, as his corporation's management style has evolved to cope with a burgeoning staff of artists and technicians, changing public tastes, and changing perceptions of those tastes. One generalization I do suggest, however, is that Disney the man and the corporation are known for a belief in control. The top-down management style Disney epitomizes-Auschwitz (Giroux 55), or Mouschwitz (Lewis 88), is a frequent analogy-thrives on homogeneity and rigid adherence to rules. These are features often decried in Disney production and product, both by critics of capitalism, such as Benjamin and Adorno,1 and by far less radical proponents of individualism and open debate, from early Disney biographer Richard Schickel to educator Henry Giroux. Yet imagination, the company's major commodity, does not easily lend itself to a program of control. To encourage imagination in artists, and arouse it in viewers, is to invite unique self-expression rather than homogeneity, and spontaneity rather than predictability. Link imagination to the animated cartoon, an art form with roots in dada, surrealism, and radical politics, and matters could well get out of hand.2 I believe that this conflict between control and imaginative freedom is visible in the animated features that have come out of the Disney studios, from Snow White ana the Seven Dwarfs to LiIo and Stitch. Of course, ambiguity is rarely viewed now as either a moral or an aesthetic flaw, and the presence of elements that contradict each other may well be preferable to consistent, monologic disapproval of imagination. Neither, however, do conflict and contradiction in themselves necessarily create a space for viewers to question values and exercise judgment. Much depends on how the elements relate to each other, or how an audience is likely to relate them. An audience even partially looking for guides to behavior along with entertainment will have to resolve apparent ambiguities into one suggested course of action. Giroux's attack on Disney rests on the contention that ior children, these movies, however apparently bland, do have a didactic effect (18). For them, ambiguity at its best ultimately resolves into a connected but complex world view that embraces difference and spontaneity; at its worst, it can produce confusion and anxiety. I wish to explore the overall impressions these films may give children about the value of their own imaginations, and thus about their own value as unique individuals able to envision, and eventually to enact, change. In particular, to get back to Ariel, I am concerned about what girls may learn about this potentially explosive aspect of their characters that could so easily burst the bounds of traditional femininity. To help answer this question, I have chosen to examine the way various elements of image, story, and dialogue interact to influence the valuation of imagination in three of Disney's girls' movies: Alice in Wonderland (1951), The Little Mermaid (1989), and Beauty and the Beast (1991, re-released 2001). …

Abstract: Setting out to investigate the frame-story of the Nights and its impact on Eastern and Western literature, I was unaware of the wealth of studies that have been published. They range from strictly philological research to postmodern literary studies. The former often include considerable reservations about the latter and their seemingly inflated interpretations of details. For this reason, I have largely restricted myself to reconsidering previous theses and theories and will regroup different approaches as to content, form, or both while focusing on Shahrazâds different roles as "heroine," "narrator," and "woman." Introduction "Your name's really Sherazade?" "Yes." "Really? It's . . . it's so . . . How can I put it? You know who Sheherazade was?" "Yes." "And that doesn't mean anything to you?" "No." "You think you can be called Sherazade, just like that? . . ." "No idea." He looked at her, standing the other side of the high, round counter at the fast-food, unable to believe his eyes. "And why not Aziyade?" "Who's that?" "A beautiful Turkish woman from Istanbul who Pierre Loti was in love with, a hundred years ago." "Pierre Loti I've heard of. Not Aziyade." ". . . Aziyade belonged to the harem of an old Turk. She was a young Circassian slave, converted to Islam." "Why you telling me about this woman? She's got nothing to do with me." "She had green eyes, like you." "That's no reason." Sherazade was drinking her Coke out of the can. She wasn't listening any more. Julien Desrosiers went back to reading the small ads in Liberation. (Sebbar 1-2) Shahrazâd seems to be common property for Arabs and Europeans, natives and migrants, the educated and the uneducated alike. Beyond the diffusion of Shahrazâd's own story and the repertoire of her stories into many cultures, there is also evidence for their origins in many cultures. The collection known as Thousand and One Nights is the result of a "cultural and ethnic meltingprocess" (Walther 12), in which Indian and Persian elements blend (not to mention Greek, Egyptian, and Turkish). Against this multinational backdrop, the principle of intertwined stories corresponds to Arab concepts of adab by underlining the power of the word and of brilliant speech. Shahrazâd herself is a cultural amalgamate, for she speaks the Arabic language, bears a Persian name (meaning "of noble appearance and/or origin"), and employs an Indian narrative mode, the frame-story device. Moreover, it has repeatedly been pointed out that, long before Galland's French translation of the Nights started its triumphant march through the Western world, its forerunners had already stimulated European and Judeo-Christian culture. The Sindbâd-cycle has been compared to Homer's Odyssey, and Shahrazâd has been considered-and refuted-to be a sister of the biblical Esther (De Goeje; Cosquin), while the opening story of the two kings Shariyâr and Shâhzamân has been believed a variation of paradise lost and regained (Ghazoul 18). Whatever common grounds the Nights and the foundation myths of Judeo-Christian culture may have, there is no doubt that before they were even translated into French, English, and German, the Nights made their mark on European literature, in particular on the literature of Renaissance Italy (Walther 17; Littmann 359). In Europe and America as well as in the Near East, writers in the twentieth century (in fact more so than ever) still used the characters of Shahrazâd's tales and her narrative mode as models for their own writings. With this in mind, Fedwa Malti-Douglas states: "Were the Arabic Shahrazad to awaken, like some fairy tale princess, centuries after she first wove the stories in The Thousand and One Nights, she would undoubtedly be surprised by her numerous literary transformations" ("Shahrazad Feminist" 40). Robert Irwin states that it is probably easier to specify the few Western or non-Arab authors who were not affected by the Nights (Irwin 358; Pinault 65-66) than to present a comprehensive list of those who were-this list ranging from Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Sir Walter Scott, and William Thackeray through Gustave Flaubert, Stendhal, and Gerard de Nerval to H. …

Abstract: The Arabian Nights and the Panchatantra are both works of Asian origin, and both have exercised their power over folkloric and literary imagination across continents for many centuries. The Panchatantra has been considered to be the older of the two, and it is supposed to have influenced the Nights, yet the narratives about the origin of each of these works do not supply clear evidence. Both of them exist in more than one native version, and both have become popular in modern times by way of their translations into European languages. Through the ages, in telling and retelling, in translations and annotations, versions of the stories have emerged and become the subject of many scholarly works. For a folklorist scholar today, the widespread distribution and popular reception of the two works present a particular situation for research. The Arabian Nights continues to be an extremely popular work and is presented in the newest media, including, most recently, computer-animated films and video games. The Panchatantra's genre is classified as fable, and accordingly it appears most prominently in various forms of children's literature. At the academic level, constant and valuable research on the process of how the two works came into being, has revealed how they were molded and "constructed" in a continuous process lasting for many centuries. And yet, though the existing research is quite exhaustive, numerous details of their history and character, particularly of the Arabian Nights, remain to be studied (Marzolph 19). A modern folklorist is faced with this contrast between the popular renown and the academic conclusions about the Nights. If this essay, then, proposes to analyze the ending of the Nights, on which version should this analysis be based: on the famous but highly constructed one, like Richard Burton's, or on others regarded as closer to "native" or "authentic" versions? Considering the intense discussion on the subject of the construction of the Nights, none of the versions retains credibility. I see this as the particular situation of research today when we are aware of the "folklore" materials as they have emerged in the process of modernity and textualizing. With reference to the textualization of Asian folkloric works into European languages during the past five centuries, it is worth noting that the so-called constructs have acquired an identity that has its own authenticity, such as an identity across national boundaries. Galland's Mille et une Nuits or Burton's Nights, for example, are known to millions of readers across the world as The Thousand and One Nights or the Arabian Nights. The "constructs" exist and cannot be wished away. More important, they need to be treated as "folklore" materials of a very special kind. Indeed, the process of textualization of oral narratives is often complex and varied. Each textualized narrative is a version, and there are often various textualized versions prepared from different sources, which is exactly the situation in the case of the Arabian Nights. How, then, should these different textualizations be treated for interpretative and analytical studies? I think that they present a situation similar to the one offered by oral variants. Global Folklore The various European versions of the Arabian Nights, based on different manuscripts, may be seen as different textualized versions. At the same time, our academic understanding of the Arabian Nights as a Western "construct" should not prevent us from acknowledging their "folkloric" identity. If the "constructs" have become internationally renowned versions, then their analysis refers probably less to their native contexts and more to their acquired international meaning. At a more specific level, the process of the emergence of European "constructs" of Asian folklore and their travel across continents is intrinsically related to the geography of the colonial world. "Folklore" from different parts of the world traveled to various other parts in the languages of the colonial rulers with an unprecedented speed. …

Abstract: "I'll tell you what I'll do," said the smith. "I'll fix your sword for you tomorrow, if you tell me a story while I'm doing it." The speaker was an Irish storyteller in 1935, framing one story in another (O'Sullivan 75, 264). The moment recalls the Thousand and One Nights, where the story of "The Envier and the Envied" is enclosed in the larger story told by the second Kalandar (Burton 1: 113-39), and many stories are enclosed in others. It was quite traditional for the Irish storyteller, historically disconnected from Arabian tradition, to use a frame-story. Folktale scholars label it "Story-teller Interrupted by Woman" and number it AT 1376A*. The Thousand and One Nights shows the literary imitation of that orally invented device; it standardizes the movement from one story into the next. So too "in the Sanskrit Five Books [the Panchatantra] the tales are neatly bound together by multiple use of framing" (Edmonson 143). Frame-stories in such collections are frequent enough for scholars to designate several as standing alone and establish a genre (Thompson, Folktale 415; Blackburn 496). All this is common knowledge to students of the Thousand and One Nights. I draw my examples from two stratified societies. Ancient Ireland surrounded its kings with a cattle-owning aristocracy whose dependants were firmly kept in lower social grades. Ancient India invented a system of caste too well known to need description (Dumont). Such societies foster the habit of subordinating one plot to another, creating that affinity that Theodor W Adorno perceived, "between the formal configuration of the artwork and the structure of the social system" (Hohendahl 172). Stratified societies favor frame-stories. In literary collections, and the criticism they have provoked, framing becomes either a genre or "a narrative mechanism for the linkage of possibly unrelated tales" (Belcher 1). In oral performance, framing is one device among many. What is the mechanism but a formal stylization of people's habit of interrupting their discourses, of going to another level? Framing is more than a mechanism; it is a human habit (Goffman) and a cultural universal. Therefore it sustains a variety of critical approaches. Modes of criticism, which intend to make sense of what is said, themselves function as interpretive frames (Bauman and Briggs 231). I discuss half a dozen kinds of framing; I attach some modes of criticism to them; I draw some examples from islands of the Southwest Indian Ocean (Madagascar, Mauritius, Reunion, Comoros, and Seychelles).' Frame-Story as a Genre If each tale, like the Irish one 1 began with, is a thing, an autonomous whole, then a genre becomes a thing as well, and the frame-story is a genre (though not only that). Still, because it requires other genres to live on, this one is parasitic. Perhaps it isn't an oral genre all over Africa (Belcher), but African performers do link (heir pieces. For instance, they often tell trickster tales in clusters or chains, so neatly that when collectors reproduce the cluster in the translations they publish, a reader can deduce principles of sequencing (Fontoynont and Raomandahy 83-86). One principle is to alternate trickster's success with his defeat and lead the audience toward a sense of cosmic order (Paulme, "Quelques procedes"). The audience's memory supplies another sort of frame: their familiarity with trickster's predictable behavior. Afghanistan and Ireland show plenty of examples of oral framing (Mills 123), the latter perhaps under literary influence (Belcher 16-18). But orality knows them too. In the story I began with, the smith requires Cuchulainn to tell him a story whilst mending his sword. When the smiths wife violates Cuchulainn's interdiction against eavesdropping, Cuchulainn breaks off the story of his adventure at its most suspenseful point, where he was in serious danger from a giant. The framed story is incomplete; the smith, his helper, and his wife are punished by the curtailment of Cuchulainn's performance. …

Abstract: It is a preposterous title, of course. Should we also look for political thought in Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs? Or in the slapstick films of Laurel and Hardy? Or in Superman comics? Surely, whereas politics is "the art of the possible," The Thousand and One Nights (henceforth: Nights) is, in large part at least, the art of the impossible. Yet a moment's reflection allows one to realize that the title is not so very preposterous after all. To start with, the exordium to the Nights, with its references to doomed and vanished dynasties ("Thamud, 1Ad and Pharaoh of the Vast Domain") and its promise to provide lessons based on "what happened to kings from the beginning of time," strongly suggests that political concerns were not wholly alien to those who contributed to the Nights (Mahdi 1: 56; Haddawy T). In listening to Sheherezade, Shahriyâr is supposed to be learning from past examples (even if the political philosopher, Michael Oakeshott, once described the study of history as something the historian loves "as a mistress of whom he never tires and whom he never expects to talk sense" [182]). In the light of the opening exordium, the whole of the Nighis can be considered to be an overblown and out-of-control example of the literary genre of mirror-for-princes (German Furstenspiegel). In the mirror-for-princes section of Nasihat al-muluk, a work spuriously attributed to the eleventh-century theologian and Sufi, al-Ghazâli (d. 1111), the reading of stories about past kings is advocated as a royal duty: "He must also read the books of good counsel . . . just as Anushirvân . . . used to read the books of former kings, ask for stories about them and follow their ways" (Crone, "Did alGhazali Write a Mirror for Princes?" 184). To look at the politics of the Nights from another angle, when Elie Kedoune, in a study of modern Middle Eastern politics, came to discuss the medieval and Islamic legacy to the politics of the modern Middle East, he touched on the despotic powers of the caliphs and specifically of Abbasid Caliph Hârun al-Rashid, and he had this to say: "The emblem of his terrible power is the black executioner who, in the Nights, is shown to be in constant attendance on Hârun al-Rashid. Nearness to supreme power is perilous. The constant care of the ordinary subject is to avoid the attention of authority. A story in the Nights concerns a householder who, coming back from work in the evening, finds a corpse near his door. He is terrified to report his discovery to the police, lest they accuse him of murder. . . ." Having given (a slightly garbled) version of "The Tale of the Hunchback" with its migratory corpse, Kedourie made the point that for most people under a premodern Islamic regime, happiness was dependent on having as little as possible to do with the rulers, and he went on to quote Hârun al-Rashid's son and successor, the Caliph al-Ma'mun, who declared that "the best life has he who has an ample house, a beautiful wife, and sufficient means, who does not know us and whom we do not know" (15). Historically it was probably quite easy for middle- or lower-class Baghdadis to avoid the real Hârun. But in the fictions of the Nights, humble folk were not so lucky, and for many of them, their story, and their peril begin when they come up against the nocturnally prowling caliph and suddenly find themselves talking for their lives. Modern political textbooks tend to be drab productions. This was not always the case in medieval times, when storytelling was an accepted way of transmitting religious, political, and moral ideas. Political treatises are not the only possible expressions of political thought (even if the academic prejudice inclines that way). Mobs and mob violence, carnivals and kings-for-a-day shadow theatre and storytelling can all furnish examples of the politics of the street. For all its apparent wildness, the politics of the street has tended to be conservative. Mobs in eighteenth-century England were more likely to riot against freethinkers and Roman Catholics than they were to demonstrate against the government (White 104-20; cf. …

Abstract: The Hard Facts of the Grimms' Fairy Tales. By Maria Tatar. Expanded second edition. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2003. xxxvi + 325 pp. The fairy-tale scholarship that emerged in the 1970s and 1980s is remarkable in both its quantity and quality. Most of this work occurred in the wake of the Grimm bicentennial celebrations in 1985-86, which occasioned a fundamental reassessment of the brothers' tales and generated enormous interest-both scholarly and popular-in the fairy tale. Among the influential works of scholarship that were published during those two decades, I think in particular of the several editions of Grimms' tales edited by Heinz Rolleke; Ruth B. Bottigheimer's Grimms' Bad Girls and Bold Boys (1987); James M. McGlathery's The Brothers Grimm and Folktale (1988); and the many books authored, edited, or translated by Jack Zipes, from Breaking the Magic Spell (1979) and The Trials and Tribulations of Little Red Riding Hood (1983), to The Complete Tales of the Brothers Grimm (1987) and The Brothers Grimm (1988). I also think of Maria Tatar's elegant study of the fairy tale's "hard core," The Hard Facts of the Grimms' Fairy Tales. Published in 1987, The Hard Facts is not only one of the most important studies that emerged from the bicentennial years, it is also, in a broader context, an exemplary work of scholarship. Attesting to the book's enduring values, Princeton University Press has now reissued it in a second expanded edition. When I reviewed The Hard Facts after its first publication, I emphasized its successful interdisciplinary mix of methods from folklore, literary criticism, social history, and psychoanalysis; its lucid introduction to the fundamental realities of Grimms' collecting, editing, and rewriting; its sound analysis of the Grimms' male and female characters; and Tatar's compelling deconstruction of the Bluebeard tale and its critical reception, which in the meantime has become one of the most frequently cited passages of her book. My assessment and admiration for this book have not changed. Its arguments and demonstrations remain fresh, and the expanded second edition brings new materials that enhance the book's usefulness, especially in teaching. Specifically, the expanded edition includes a new preface that speaks eloquently to the problems and power of Grimms' fairy tales in our cultural and personal lives and the need to "interrogate and take the measure of their project" (xvii) precisely because of that power. The new edition also offers translations and commentaries for six tales from the 1857 edition of the Kinder- und Hausmarchen ("Little Red Riding Hood," "Hansel and Gretel," "The Robber Bridegroom," "Cinderella," "Snow White," and "Thousandfurs"). …

Abstract: A story found in many forms in Arabic has the following basic structure: (1) A man owns a slave-girl. Usually, the man is young and wealthy and the girl both beautiful and accomplished, especially in singing and playing. It is understood that the girl is the man's concubine (as is normal according to traditional Islamic law). (2) The man and the slave-gin love each other. This is not always stated explicitly, but must then be inferred from the rest of the story. (3) The man becomes, destitute. Often this is the man's fault, by spending all his money on his girl. In one version (see nos. 14-15 below in the appendix), it is not his fault but caused by the discontinuation of a regular stipend. (4) The man sells the girl. The initiative may be taken by either. There is a touch of paradox here, for one would expect true lovers to prefer suffering extreme poverty to being separated. Some versions explain it as an act of unselfishness on the part of the man or the girl. (5) The new owner becomes aware of their attachment. (6) He generously returns the slave-girl to her lover. He does not ask his money back and often gives some extras. The sequence (1)-(6) can be further reduced to the following very elementary plot summary: Union/Possession (1+2) Separation/Loss (3+4) Reunion/Repossession (5+6) This is a basic structure of the "Relief After Distress" genre; it is not surprising that al-Tanukhi (d. 994), author of a collection of stories on this theme, offers many versions. The linking of (re)union with (re)possession and of separation with loss is of course a result of the traditional Muslim system of concubinage. It does not necessarily imply that from a narrative point of view the girl is inferior to the man. On the contrary, morally, intellectually and artistically she is usually the superior partner. Some versions are expanded by complications coming between (4) and (5) or (5) and (6). Exceptionally (see no. 17), a reduced structure is found: a man sells a slave-girl and only afterwards falls in love with her. This may be represented as (1-4-5-6-2). All versions are essentially realistic, without demons, magic or other supernatural elements. The realism is often enhanced by means of details from everyday life, by real place names and names of real-life protagonists, or by providing a chain of authorities for the story. Several clusters of closely related versions can be discerned. The Thousand and One Nights contains two stories of this type (as well as some stories with closely related motifs). Far more versions, some of them virtually identical to those of the Nights, are found in works belonging to "polite" or "elite" literary culture, from the ninth century onward. It is likely that the type was around already in the time of al-Madâini (d. ca. 850; see no. 8). The oldest source used here is al-Muhabbar by Muhammad Ibn Habib (d. 860; see no. 2). From a narrative point of view the stories are often rather uninteresting since they lack a human opponent, Fate being the principal adversary. To make up for this, some elaborations enhance the role of Fate, either by introducing the usual unlikely coincidences or by introducing real adversaries, such as is found in the story of al-Hikâyât al-'ajiba (no. 19). An inventory of plot summaries of the versions I have found, with some comments and references, is attached as a lengthy appendix. The authors' sources, often given in the form of a chain of authorities, are omitted here. It is impossible to establish a precise chronological order, and the order in the following presentation is to some extent arbitrary. Mention of historical persons in the story is of course no guarantee for its veracity, and the story may have been invented much later. However, if such persons are relatively obscure, rather than famous, there is a good chance that the story is not much later than the time frame of the person mentioned. …

Abstract: Published between 1704 and 1717, the first European translation of the collection of stories commonly known in English as The Arabian Nights, is the work of the French Orientalist scholar Antoine Galland (1646-1715). His twelve-volume collection bears the generic title Les Mille et une Nuit,1 contes arabes traduits en francois (The Thousand and One Nights, Arabic tales translated into French). This title veils both the sources exploited and the strategy practiced in rewriting. The collection's initial eight volumes and the beginning of volume 9 are based on Arabic manuscripts of Alf laylah wa-laylah (literally: A Thousand Nights and a Night). In accordance with the practice current in the seventeenth century, they contain an adapted translation of the Arabic source material. The collection's final volumes are based on the oral tales procured from the narrator Hanna, and it was Galland who inserted them into the corpus of his Mille et une Nuits. These tales-particularly the stories of Aladdin and Ali Baba-in the following came to be regarded as prototypes of the stories in the Nights. At the same time, except for the tale of the Ebony Horse, these tales do not form part of the Arabic redaction of the Nights known in scholarship as Zotenberg's Egyptian Recension (ZER). Drawn primarily from oral sources, the set of tales deriving from Hanna's performance leaves more room for creation than do those tales translated from a written source text. In my earlier study on Galland's version, I studied the first part of his collection and, by comparing the translation with the source text, was able to show that Galland had adapted the original Arabic text without essentially distorting it (Larzul, Les traductions). In the present contribution, while taking into account the conclusions from my previous study, I propose to examine the collections second part, the one based on Hanna's tales. In introducing this matter, it is useful to briefly recall Galland's sources. A Work of Creation In the initial eight volumes of his collection, published between 1704 and 1709, Galland exhausted nearly all the material from the Arabic manuscripts of Alf laylah in his possession. The "Histoire du dormeur eveille" ("Story of the Awakened Sleeper")-accomplished by the end of 1708 (Omont December 20, 1708) and published in volume 9 in 1712-is already taken from an Arabic manuscript not belonging to the tradition of Alf laylah. When his written source material was exhausted, Galland in vain tried to obtain more tales from the Levant. Then, in 1709, he had the fortune to become acquainted with Hanna, a Christian (Maronite) Syrian from Alep, in the home of his friend, the traveller Paul Lucas. From him he was able to collect a total of thirteen Arabic tales2 from oral storytelling. Between May 6 and June 3, 1709, he took down the summaries of twelve tales in his journal. Already on May 5, 1709, the "Histoire d Aladdin" ("Story of Aladdin")-with its title alone being mentioned in the Journal-had become a part of his collection. As mentioned in a later notice, Hanna provided him with a copy of the tale in Arabic (Omont, November 3, 1710). At one point, Galland also received a written version of the "Aventures du calife Haroun al-Rachid" ("Story of the Adventures of the Caliph Hârun al-Râshid" [Omont, January 10, 1711]), though the exact status of the final tale contained within this frame story, the "Histoire de Cogia Hassan Alhabbal" ("Story of Khawâja Hasan el-Habbâl") is not clear. Galland might even have received a written copy of the "Histoire d'Ali Baba" ("Story of Ali Baba"), mentioned as "Hogia Baba" in his summary. Unfortunately, none of the written texts prepared by Hanna have survived till the present day,3 and so the only available source for these tales remain Galland's summaries (Abdel-Halim 428-70). In his Journal, Galland never referred to Hanna's narratives as tales of the Mille et une Nuits. Nevertheless, as of November 1710, eighteen months after having heard them, he used these tales when he began to write new tales that he linked to the previous ones by having Shahrazâd tell them. …

Abstract: In this essay, I elucidate how The Moor's Last Sigh (1995) can be regarded as Rushdie's attempt to use a combination of Western and Eastern fairy-tale intertexts as a groundwork for his own fairy tale about Utopian worlds, through which he participates in the postcolonial project of resisting Euro-American normative representations of the Other. The Moor's Last Sigh was the first novel written by Rushdie after his being sentenced to a fatwa in 1989. In the rush of cosmopolitan optimism and the idealist conviction that the imagined world he wrote about in The Satanic Verses (1989) actually existed, Rushdie created a Utopia that was shattered abruptly and brutally by reality. Perhaps this is why The Moor's Last Sigh was preceded by a fairy tale per se, Haroun and the Sea of Stories (1990), a combination of Indian storytelling and the Western tradition of the genre, serving as a transposition of the personal, the artistic, and the political aspects of his position, as well as offering a Utopian solution to his predicament. Rushdie created a world without imposed silence, in which literature, by harboring the right to free expression, functions as a guide to the dark alleys of current history. Admittedly, this vision has so far been attainable only in a fairy tale, but the book did help Rushdie ease himself out of the fatwa spell and recommence writing, the result of which was The Moor's Last Sigh, another narrative whose ceaseless traffic of cultures counteracts traditional Orientalist accounts of the East. Rushdie values the fairy tale not just as a literary category but also as a form that enjoys its own life, and which, as Jack Zipes is right to contend, "continue[s] to exercise an extraordinary hold over our real and imaginative lives from childhood to adulthood" (Breaking 22). Indeed, it offers a rich and complex system that could be defined as "a language of the imagination, with a vocabulary of images and a syntax of plots" (Warner, Beast xxiii), as well as a broad "sociocultural web" (When Dreams x). Rushdie's reworkings of the fairy tale correspond to the complex status of the genre in contemporary culture and can be regarded as a consistent fairy-tale poetics underpinning his fiction. Apart from Haroun and the Sea of Stories, one could mention such fairy-tale transformations as the coherent use of the Utopian qualities of the genre (Midnight's Children, The Satanic Verses, The Moor's Last Sigh, Fury); the deployment of female fairy-tale heroines as vehicles for Rushdie's involvement in feminist discourses (Shame, "At the Auction of the Ruby Slippers," The Ground Beneath Her Feet); or the frequent allusions to the commodified mass-mediated fairy tale as a reflection of the postmodern condition (Grimus, "At the Auction of the Ruby Slippers," The Ground Beneath Her Feet, Fury). Hence, Rushdie emerges as a storyteller who is "implicated in processes of cultural formation, of recycling [fairy-tale] frames used to make sense of culture" (Stephens and McCallum xi). In this sense, the various instances of his intervention in the commonly accepted framework of the fairy tale reveal his artistic and ideological positions of an author engaged in what Benjamin R. Barber defines as "a war within civilization, a struggle that expresses the ambivalence within each culture as it faces a global, networked, material future and wonders whether cultural and national autonomy can be retained; the ambivalence within each individual juggling the obvious benefits of modernity with its equally obvious costs" (249). I will begin my discussion by briefly outlining Jack Zipes's elaboration of the fairy-tale Utopia as proposed by Ernst Bloch in his Principle of Hope (1973), which can be regarded as the most effective exponent of the Utopian imagination harbored in fairy tales and which, as I will argue, applies to Rushdie's attempts to create his own postcolonial fairy tale. Then I will discuss the figure of Moraes, Rushdie's raconteur, in the context of the storytelling strategy deployed by the writer. …

Abstract: Postmodernist fiction usually addresses certain semiotic concerns about the relationship between language and things, between word and world. Its literary techniques cast doubt on what we tend to call "real": the world in its social-if not material-manifestation, the subject as an entity, historical "facts" and "grand narratives" as global, totalizing explanations for society and the human condition. The world is experienced and conveyed through language, and the charges against those "truths" range from seeing them as tainted by the medium to assuming they are entirely created by it. The world itself is radically called into question, and the status of reality and our place in it are unclear. Postmodernism creates ontological uncertainties where modernism posed mainly epistemological ones (McHale 6-11). Art has not been considered to be a reliable mirror of reality since the onset of modernism in art about a hundred years ago. By now it is not even believed to provide a source of meaning or order in the face of general chaos. The resulting literary practice involves techniques that reveal both the processes through which fiction produces meaning and the artificial status of fictional constructs. This can be achieved through implicit or explicit reflection on construction and product: metafiction. Also, traditional forms of narrative logic are broken and a radical destabilization of the fictional world and its principles results. One way of contemplating the fictional construction of meaning is conscious intertextuality. The idea of the author as original creator has long been challenged, and a number of theories regard all texts as intertextual, as they may all just be networks of quotations and incorporations of existing texts.1 Postmodern texts, however, often directly address this problem by referring, in one way or another, to specific texts or genres. The results have been called parodies by Linda Hutcheon (22), pastiches by Fredric Jameson (72), or palimpsests by Gerard Genette (532). In order to understand them, the reader needs to have internalized a set of rules and conventions of the parodied works or genres, that is, possess a specific competence (which may well be unconscious). Only then can readers understand and judge a particular performance.2 One of the genres used by postmodernist writers is the classical fairy tale, and their stories demand to be read in relation to fairy-tale traditions. Judgments about these stories use our competence, which determines our expectations of them. These expectations are indirectly or directly addressed, and we are therefore forced to question our understanding of those tales. In using formula fiction to create pastiche, palimpsest, or parody, artists expose the mechanisms that make up our competence in understanding them. Formulaic fiction-and fairy tales can be counted as an example of this-emphasizes the logic and dynamic of certain forms of plot and is rule-driven. Postmodernist writers use it parodically to show how worlds are constructed through narrative. The stylized characteristics of a genre, consciously, that is, metafictionally, applied, present stories as organized art, as games with certain rules. Briar Rose "Dornroschen" is one of the best-known tales from the Grimms' collection, but like most of them has predecessors in other European countries. At the beginning of the seventeenth century, the Neapolitan writer Giambattista Basile collected fifty stories in his Pentamerone, which originate from the oral tradition but were written down in baroque style. His "Sun, Moon, and Talia" resembles the later "Dornroschen." The French writer Charles Perrault closed his 1697 collection of tales with "La belle au bois dormant." But even much earlier, the basic elements of the Aarne-Thompson type 410 tale can be found in an episode of the fourteenth-century French Arthurian story Perceforest (Thompson 97). In the famous and still the most widely known version by the brothers Grimm (adapted by Disney for their animated film), the royal couple celebrates the birth of their long-wanted child. …

Abstract: Through their depiction of incidents in which "goodness" is rewarded and "evil" deeds punished, folk and fairy tales function as pedagogical tools that illustrate cultural values, enforce the status quo, and define socially acceptable and unacceptable behavior. Yet this function certainly is not limited to the prose tales alone: traditional ballads, the old story-songs still performed in Anglo-American cultures, also tell the stories of men and women who must cope with established cultural conventions. The 305 traditional Scottish and English ballads collected by American folklorist Francis James Child at the end of the nineteenth century are filled with such stories, and their commentary on human relationships and social strictures has been the subject of some interest to both folklorists and social analysts in the twentieth century. The following essay identifies the sociocultural messages underlying one of the more well-known of these ballads, "Tam Lin," through an examination of the metaphorical meanings of the ballad's basic motifs and plot sequences, first in its oral form of folk ballad and then as it has been recast into prose narratives for twentieth-century British and American children and young adults. The purpose of this examination is to explore what constitutes the resonance, or core, of the "Tam Lin" ballad: that is, what elements, motifs, or meanings remain or are retained throughout various transformations, including those regarding genre, plot, characterization, and audience, and why the story still has meaning for today's audiences and storytellers. Traditional folk ballads can be categorized, as ballad scholar David Buchan notes, into three major groups: the magical and marvelous, the romantic and tragic, and the historical and semihistorical, along with a fourth, smaller group consisting of comic ballads (Scottish Ballad Book 5; see also Lang, "The Ballads" 520-21). Although some folk ballads-those Buchan labels as "historical"-either are concerned with the deeds of legendary figures, such as Robin Hood and Allen-a-Dale, or derive from actual historical or political events, folk ballads as a whole most often tell about love won or lost in some way; the early twentieth-century ballad scholar Gordon Gerould observed that "of the 305 specimens printed by Child, by far the largest number have to do with what may be called private and personal affairs rather than matters that concern the larger social units of clan or nation," and that nearly half of the ballad stories in the Child corpus are "love-stories of one sort or another" or concern crimes of violence that derive from sexual relationships (38-39; see also Buchan, Scottish Ballad Book 5). This focus is particularly true of the supernatural ballads, which tell of lovers won or returned from Fairyland or released from fairy enchantments. The conventional approach in modern ballad scholarship has been to treat folk ballads as an entity separate from folktales-as indeed they are as far as form and genre are concerned. Yet as Buchan observes, interrelationships between the genres of traditional material do exist: many ballads have motifs that can be found in the Stith Thompson Motif-Index of Folk Literature, a tool commonly used to categorize folk narratives, and several of the supernatural ballads share themes and motifs with fairy tales found listed in the Aarne-Thompson Tale Type Index between AT 400 and AT 450 (Scottish Ballad Book 7-8). Like fairy tales, the ballads that narrate supernatural events involve interactions with the Otherworld as well as with inhabitants of this world. Concerning this particular group of ballads, nineteenth-century folklorist Andrew Lang commented on their "close resemblance to prose Marchen [. . .] with their folklore incidents, based on universal superstitions and customs" and diffuse authorship, calling them "popular Marchen in rhyme" ("The Ballad" 521). Transformation and enchantment, and supernatural beings such as fairies and ghosts, infuse the narratives of these ballads and contribute to the action of the plot, as these elements do in traditional folk and fairy tales. …

Abstract: The number alf (1,000) in the Arabic title has been a permanent challenge for copyists and compilators committed to the transmission of texts of the Arabian Nights. "Complete" sets of the work seem to have survived in their entirety only a short time. So copyists must have felt invited to (re)create a complete Nights. This paper presents the different solutions applied by copyists and compilators in order to achieve their ambitious goals, the honest and deceitful methods and the tricks displayed in the Arabic texts as well as in the European translations of the Nights.

Abstract: Translator's Introduction Concha Castroviejo (1910-95), Spanish journalist, critic, novelist, and short story writer, was born in Santiago de Compostela (northwestern Spain) and died in Madrid after having lived a full life on two continents. Upon completion of her secondary studies, she enrolled in the Humanities program of the University of Santiago de Compostela and took a degree in philosophy and letters (Filosofia y letras). Fluent in French, a language she had begun to study in elementary school, she also attended the University of Bordeaux, a city in which she resided for long periods. After the end of the Spanish Civil War (1936-39) Castroviejo and her husband Joaquin Seijo Alonso fled their homeland and went into exile in Mexico. At first they lived in Campeche, on the Yucatan Peninsula, where both taught at the university. The two eventually relocated to Mexico City, where they resided until the end of the 1940s, and it was there that their only daughter Maria Antonia was born. When Castroviejo returned to Spain in 1950, she obtained a degree in journalism and went on to write for well-known newspapers like Informaciones and La hoja del lunes. While pursuing a career as a newspaperwoman, she also began to publish articles of literary criticism and pieces of short fiction in La Estafeta Literaria, Insula, Blanco y Negro, and Q.P. In long fiction Concha Castroviejo published two novels: Those Who Went Away (Los que se fueron, 1957) about Spanish Civil War expatriates-a widow and her son-who go first to Paris and afterwards to Mexico, where the mother sees that her son's future lies in this new country, not Spain; and Eve of Hate (Vispera del odio, 1959), which received the Elisenda de Moncada Prize, about a woman who has an illegitimate child and grows to hate her husband for his cruelty and greed, again with the Spanish Civil War as background. (It was translated into French in 1965.) In short fiction Castroviejo published two books of children's stones: The Garden with Seven Gates (El jardin de las siete puertas, 1961), which received the Doncel Prize (and was translated into Slovak in 1973); and Linas Days (Los dias de Lina, 1971), written with grant support from the Juan March Foundation. Every reader of Charles Perrault and the Brothers Grimms knows, to state the obvious, that fairy tales are not for children alone, inasmuch as they speak to fantasies and fears that are our constant companions in life. The stones that make up The Garden with Seven Gates will, I believe, be viewed in the same light-although peopled with children protagonists, they are not for children alone. It is a collection of stones that can be variously classified as lyrical and enchanting and of stones that can be variously classified as morality, cautionary, and fairy tales. In this last category "The Weaver of Dreams" ("La tejedora de suenos") stands out. Replete with a lone little girl who ventures deep into a forest, a multicolored house (with seven chimneys that issue smoke in seven different colors), cuckoos and swifts that carry commissions in their bills, a bear that supplies firewood, rabbits that bring vegetables-in a word, the stuff of enchantment-Castroviejo's tale takes Rogelia, the child protagonist, on a journey of discovery. Ridiculed at home and at school, Rogelia dares to dream but finds no outlet for her fantasies until she meets the old woman who is a weaver of dreams. Her discovery is that she is not useless, that she can create beauty, that she can console the sick, that, in fine, she has found her niche in life, i.e., the best realization of the best dream. Another look at "The Weaver of Dreams" examines the story from the feminist perspective of a Spanish woman who can speak to the life of a Spanish girl. I refer to the arresting interpretation of Carolina Fernandez Rodriguez, who has kindly given me permission to reproduce it here in its entirety: Women's inferior condition in a patriarchal regime is another topic that can be occasionally glimpsed in the collection (The Garden with Seven Gates), in "The Weaver of Dreams," for example, one can see the kind of traditional upbringing that a Spanish girl was expected to have in the 1960s. …

Abstract: Jacques Cazotte (1719-92) was an eighteenth-century French writer who deserves to be ranked among the more distinguished figures of French literature and, according to some critics, even among those occupying the front ranks. He is remembered mainly for his novel Le diable amoureux (The Devil in Love), published in 1772, a work that is known as a "Spanish novella" because of its special blend of fantasy and romance. Among the scholars quoted below who have written about Cazotte and his roman fantastique, Edward Pease Shaw and Georges Decote-the most important scholar specializing in Cazotte-deserve particular mention. These two have described in detail his life, the intellectual and spiritual contexts of his tempestuous historical period, and his numerous literary works. Cazotte is connected to the Arabian Nights through his work called Suite des Mille et une Nuits (Continuation of the Thousand and One Nights), which claimed to be a continuation of the famous Oriental collection of stories. The earlier editions of this work were also called Continuation des Mille et une Nuits, and both titles are given at the beginning of identical volumes, sometimes even on opposite title pages, as if one of them is the work's title and the other its explanation. The work is printed in the congenial small format of many contemporary editions of stories and legends. It was first published-as volumes 38-41 of the famous series Cabinet des fees-in four volumes in Paris and Geneva in 1788-89,1 on the eve of the French Revolution just a short time before the guillotine put an end to the authors life on September 25, 1792, in the square known as the Place du Carrousel. In some library catalogues, one finds the work listed under the heading of "traduction des Mille et une Nuits," as if it were a translation of the Arabian Nights. Whether or not it may be regarded as such depends on the interpretation of the term "continuation/suite" in the work's title. In this regard, two trends can be distinguished: (1) In some parts of the work, Cazotte and his "informant," Dom Denis Chavis, have pretended to rediscover materials that might have belonged to the Arabian Nights-similar to those tales published, a few years later, by Joseph von Hammer-Purgstall and his translator Guillaume Stanislas Trebutien. (2) The other parts contain stories not known to be included in any of the different manuscripts or redactions of the Arabian Nights. In these parts, Cazotte and Chavis have rather compiled stories from various manuscripts in the royal library that contained suitable material (Decote, Correspondance 101, 103, 107). A similar phenomenon is known from anthologies by various other authors, both published previously and later, such as Les Mille et un Jours (The Thousand and One Days, 1710-12) by Francois Petis de La Croix (1653-1713); Les Mille et un Quarts d'heure (The Thousand and One Quarters of an Hour, 1712) and other works by Thomas-Simon Gueullette (1683-1766); or Rosenol (Pil of Roses, 1813) by Hammer-Purgstall (1774-1856), collected from a variety of written sources which are not the Arabian Nights2 Both trends existed in those days. Even if we prefer to interpret the work as being characterized by the former trend, the latter practice remains in the background and enriches our understanding of the contemporary attitude towards a creative translation of fiction, even allowing for the freedom of inventing or adding new passages (Shaw 80-81, especially n. 277). These aspects of creative writing in the period under consideration are also illustrated by Cazotte's question (Decote, Correspondance 127) whether his stories are inferior to those rendered by the famous scholar and writer Antoine Galland (1646-1715), the first French translator of the Arabian Nights3 For the present contribution, I have used a later edition of Cazotte's tales, published under the interesting title Les veillees du sultan Schahriar avec la sultane Scheherazade (The Nocturnal Conversations of sultan Schahriar with his wife Scheherazade, 1793). …

Abstract: The text of reference in which the tale of Ali Baba appears for the first time goes back, theoretically, to the ninth century. It was around this period that a Persian book called Hazâr Afsânag (A Thousand Tales) was translated into Arabic, taking the new name of Alf laylah wa-laylah (The Thousand and One Nights). Since this mythical period, the Thousand and One Nights (henceforth: Nights) have not ceased changing. The manner in which the famous collection of tales was perceived by its various contributors over the centuries is undoubtedly the prime cause for its numerous metamorphoses. The Nights of the ninth century are not identical to those of fifteenth century, and those of the fifteenth century are quite different from those of the eighteenth century. Similarly, the French translation by Antoine Galland, published 1704-12, differs from its Arabic source text, and the translation by Joseph Charles Mardrus, published 1899-1904, differs both from the Arabic text and from Gallands translation. In terms of modern literary criticism, the Nights were never considered as a specific book compiled by an individual author. On the contrary, they were regarded, to put it in simple terms, as a work in progress that acquired its content and character in the process of an open development where different authors could contribute and introduce their own variations. The result, in modern terms, is a complex "literary creation." It is precisely in this category of "literary creation" that we have to understand Gallands work in respect to the Nights. This evaluation applies both to the collection as we know it today in general and more particularly to the tale of "Ali Baba and the Forty Thieves," a tale that was, from a certain point of view, created by Galland. As is well known, there is no reliable Arabic text of "Ali Baba" prior to the eighteenth century. In other words, no Arabic text older than that Galland's French version exists. The handwritten version preserved at the Bodleian Library in Oxford and published by Duncan B. Macdonald ("Ali Baba") dates from the nineteenth century. As the wording shows, this manuscript constitutes an Arabic translation prepared from Galland's text, a fact Macdonald himself recognized a few years later ("Further Notes"). The safest information at hand about the ultimate origin of "Ali Baba" is contained in Galland's Journal, which is preserved at the National Library of France in Paris (see Galland, Journal May 27, 1709; Macdonald, "Further Notes" 41-47). Here, Galland gives the summary of a story entitled Les finesses de Morgicme ou Les quarante voleurs extermines par l'adresse d'une esclave (Morgiane's Tricks or The Forty Robbers Exterminated by the Skill of a Female Slave). The story was narrated to Galland on the same day as the tale of The Ten Viziers. Both these tales, and several others, were told by Hanna, a Maronite monk originating from Aleppo in Syria, with whom Galland had become acquainted through his friend, the traveller Paul Lucas. The text Galland presents in his diary is rather short, hardly comprising six pages. Ali Baba is here called Hogia Baba. The descriptive passages later elaborated are here very condensed and barely visible, and the text focuses on the articulations of the intrigue. Some years later, Galland reworked the original notes and created a beautiful story, now comprising more than thirty-six pages, that he included in-and, in fact, introduced into-his edition of Les MiHe et une Nuits together with other tales supplied to him by Hanna. Subsequently, this story became part of the standard repertoire of the European notion of the Thousand and One Nights, although its author clearly is Galland himself. On the other hand, the story originates from the narrative tradition of Syria, Hanna's native country, and contains specific native components. In this essay, I propose to analyze the tale of "Ali Baba" from various angles. I will start by studying its variations in sources originating from or close to Arab narrative tradition. …

Abstract: The Poets' Grimm: 20th Century Poems from Grimm Fairy Tales. Edited by Jeanne Marie Beaumont and Claudia Carlson. Ashland, OR: Story Line Press, 2003. 287 pp. This anthology of twentieth-century fairy-tale poems is a publishing desideratum finally come true. My own compilation entitled Disenchantments: An Anthology of Modern Fairy Tale Poetry (Hanover, NH: UP of New England, 1985) has been out of print for a number of years, and it was high time that someone undertook the necessary task of editing a new collection of this fascinating subgenre of lyric poetry. Jeanne Marie Beaumont and Claudia Carlson have put together a superb anthology and they are to be commended for their careful and sensitive selection of poems. They have purposely stayed away from duplicating authors and poems from my earlier anthology. In fact, only 14 of the 78 authors included in Disenchantments also appear (usually with different texts) in The Poets' Grimm, with the latter volume featuring poems by 112 poets. This handsomely produced book with its fairy-tale-like low price is thus a treasure throve of fairy-tale poetry, a volume designed for the general reader but also most suitable for the classroom. Disenchantments had found considerable use in English and folklore classes, especially in Women's Studies courses, Honors programs, and first-year special topics seminars. There is no doubt that this new and more comprehensive anthology would be a perfect textbook, and I hasten to urge its adaptation both on the advanced high school and college level. The two editors provide a mere six-page introduction, arguing convincingly that earlier fairy-tale poetry usually consisted of retellings of commonly known fairy tales, to wit poems by Alfred Tennyson, Bret Harte, John Greenleaf Whittier, and James Whitcomb. This modus operandi changed at the beginning of the twentieth century, when poets well versed in the fairy-tale tradition started to reinterpret the tales or parts of them in innovative and thought-provoking fashion. As I have argued in my entry on "Poetry and Fairy Tales" in Jack Zipes's The Oxford Companion to Fairy Tales (Oxford: Oxford UP, 2000), "the basic message of most 20th-century poems based on or at least alluding to fairy tales is one that this is a world of problems and frustrations, where nothing works out and succeeds as in these beautiful stories of ages past. And yet, by composing their poems around fairy-tale motifs, these authors if only very indirectly seem to long for that miraculous transformation to bliss and happiness" (388). This is certainly very obvious in the fairy-tale poems of some of the best English-language poets as, for example, Randall Jarrell, Anne Sexton, Sara Henderson Hay, Olga Broumas, Hayden Carruth, Louise Gluck, Galway Kinnell, Maxine Kumin, Lisel Mueller, Allen Tate, and Jane Yolen. As expected, these poets are represented in The Poets' Grimm, but the editors have also included many less-known poets, among them Regie Cabico, Mike Carlin, Anna Denise, Meg Kearney, Elline Lipkin, Margaret Rockwell, Maria Tarrone, and Estha Weiner. For the most part, these poets and the many other authors who have written one or more fairy-tale poems reinterpret the Grimm tales in a humorous, parodie (at times nonsensical), ironical, cynical, or satirical fashion, thereby turning the positive wisdom of the tales into so-called anti-fairy tales. The themes of the poems are as universal as the insights into the human condition expressed in the traditional tales. Every imaginable human or social problem is treated, from love to hate, from politics to war, from marriage to divorce, from decency to criminality, and from sexual politics to emancipation. But there are also themes of deception, vanity, loneliness, manipulation, lovelessness, manipulation, frustration, and power. The happy ending of the fairy tales is transformed to express the complexities and anxieties of the modern age that seems far removed from the world of fairy tales. …

Abstract: As of 2004, three hundred years have passed since the introduction of the most influential work of Oriental fiction to a Western audience. Published in 1704 for the first time in a European language, Antoine Galland's Les Mille et une Nuits presented the adapted French translation of a work that through the centuries of its previous and posterior existence can best be characterized as humanity's most ingenious device to integrate diversified narrative material into a cohesive whole, as a collection possessing the potential to combine tales and stories from the most diverse origins, sources, and genres, as an omnium gatherum and a true shape-shifter in terms of narrative content. While arching back to ancient Indian tradition, the collection probably originated at some unknown period in Sassanian Iran under the title of Hezâr afsân (A Thousand Stories); it was translated into Arabic as AIf laylah wa-laylah (A Thousand and One Nights) and in English tradition gained popular renown as The Arabian Nights' Entertainments or simply the Arabian Nights. In presenting his translation in 1704, Galland achieved more, in fact much more, than to make a work of literature known to an audience different from the one for which that work had originally been created and by which it had been read. His translation initiated a wave of translations and adaptations into all major European (and, subsequently, many other) languages that itself resulted in a vogue of fiction in the "Oriental style" and inspired an endless number of imitations and re-creations of the most diverse kind not only in literature, but also in the arts, music, dance, and even architecture. Even a simple collection of short autobiographical statements about the influence of the Nights on their work by writers and creative artists from the past three hundred years would fill several volumes. At the same time, scholarly knowledge about the origin and development of the Nights is still far from being exhaustive, as important contributions-such as Muhsin Mahdis (1984-94) edition of the Arabic manuscript that served as the basis of Galland's translation-have only been presented in recent decades, and numerous questions concerning the collections history and character remain to be studied in detail. In view of the tremendous impact the Arabian Nights have exercised on Western creative imagination and following a joint proposal by the French and German national commissions, the general assembly of UNESCO has voted to include the Arabian Nights in its list of commemorative events for the period 2004-2005. Besides the preparation of an Arabian Nights Encyclopedia (Marzolph and van Leeuwen), various international meetings have been and will be convened in order to celebrate the occasion and to document the state of scholarship on the Arabian Nights. It is in this framework that, following an invitation by the Baroque library at Wolfenbuttel, Germany, the symposium "The Arabian Nights: Past and Present" will take place in September 2004. This meeting will present the findings of twenty international scholars on points ranging from the history of manuscripts of the Arabian Nights through positioning the Nights in modern and postmodern discourse to various aspects of the international reception of its tales. …

Abstract: Introduction A folk narrative may be seen as a description of life and living-real or fictitious (El-Shamy, Folk Traditions 1: xiii). Social relations, especially among family members, constitute a major part of the tales. Thus, the nature of feelings among members of the social group that a narrative describes governs the development of the plot. Positive feelings lead to positive results while negative feelings lead to a negative outcome. This principle applies to expressive culture, folk as well as elite, and has been labeled by the present author the "structure of sentiments" (El-Shamy, Traditional Structure 53-74; El-Shamy, "Emotionskomponente"), sentiments being learned feelings or affect rather than "genetically" transmitted emotions (El-Shamy, Folktales of Egypt xlvi, n. 2). Siblings play a variety of social roles in narrative traditions. As a set of behavioral expectations (El-Shamy, Folkloric Behavior 64-66), a social role is never one-dimensional. For example, a brother or a sister is an entity defined as such when he or she interacts with another sibling. The same entity becomes a son or a daughter when interacting with parents, or a maternal or paternal uncle or aunt when interacting with the child of a sibling. This essay examines sibling relations as expressed in the narratives contained in a modern popular edition of the Arabic collection Alf laylah wa-laylah, commonly known in English as The Thousand and One Nights (henceforth: Nights). As postulated and demonstrated by the present writer, the "brother-sister syndrome" is of paramount importance in Arab cultures and plays dominant roles in social structure and elite as well as oral folk literatures. The core of this dyadic relationship is a stable pattern of sentiments involving the entire family It may be summed up as follows: brother-sister mutual love; sister-sister rivalry; brother-brother rivalry; child-parent(s) hostility; husband-wife hostility (or lack of love and affection); brother-sister's husband hostility; sister-brother's wife rivalry; and brother-sister's child affection, brother-brother's son hostility (El-Shamy Brother-Sister Syndrome 320). Studies based on contemporary Arab oral traditions indicate that expressions depicting the brother-sister bond are more recurrent among women than among men and among young men more than among older men. The reasons for this phenomenon seem to be that as males progress through life, they get more satisfaction (or, perhaps, less frustration) from their relations with females. Conversely, females appear to receive less satisfaction as they age. However, additional research is required before such reasons are ascertained. The present inquiry proceeds from the assumption that the edition of Alf laylah selected for analysis contains the work of adult males. Thus, in spite of the paucity of the brother-sister themes, a significant number of cases seem to conform to the general pattern generated in other fields of expressive culture. Tales Illustrating The Brother-Brother Relationship Of sibling relations, the interaction between brother and brother is the most frequently encountered in the Nights. Besides the eight tales discussed below, the brother-brother theme also appears as a secondary detail in other narratives. One such story is the tale of al-Hasan al-Basri, in which the hero acts as umpire between two brothers quarrelling over a magic rod and a magic invisibility cap. Although this scene conforms to the negative pattern of sentiments between brothers, this intrusive detail has no consequences for the brotherbrother pattern of interaction in the tale under consideration (Alf laylah 3: 302-19, 4: 2-55; Chauvin 7: 29, no. 212A). (1) Shahryâr and his Brother Shâhzamân (Alf laylah 1: 2-5, 4: 317-18; Chauvin 5: 188, no. 111). The frame story of the Nights accounts for the experiences of two brothers, Shahryâr and Shâhzamân, each a powerful king in his own independent domain. …

Abstract: Indian Ocean Folktales. By Lee Hanng. Chennai (Madras): National Folklore Support Centre, 2002. 146 pp. Lee Haring, compiler of the Malagasy Tale Index (1982), now presents 27 tales from Madagascar, the Comoros, Mauritius, Reunion, and Seychelles. The oral sources range between the 1880s and 1990s. The text names the folk tellers when known, and notes relevant dates, places, languages, and original collectors. It provides chronologies of the Southwest Indian Ocean and of seminal folkloric work there, with maps of the region and of each island nation accompanying the introductory note in each section. Haring himself collected two tales with collaborators, and must have done all the translations from the French. A letter from the India-based publishers asks that the review "explore the significance of the attempt in bringing out the culture of the Indian diaspora." In the Southwest Indian Ocean, that diaspora includes quite distinct Gujarati merchants, Malabar coast slaves, Tamil laborers and laborers from Surat in Gujarat (Haring seems to imply Tamil laborers in Surat, which is unlikely) and, since one tale seems to be from Telegu (91), the Telegu community too, which Haring does not name, as well as North Indian speakers of Hindi and allied languages. However, none of the seven Madagascar tales nor the five from the Comoros has an Indian purview, and this volume very properly represents various coexisting diasporic cultures. The region, with no indigenous peoples, has one of the world's most mixed populations through colonization, slavery, indentured labor and trade: French, British, Malagasy (with strong AraboPersian cultural influences), East African, some West African, Indian, and Chinese. Consequently, various Creole languages developed. Each ethnic group "attempted to reconstitute a mental universe by integrating older models into the new socio-cultural environment." Often ethnic diversity means that "that sharing of folklore is the only sharing that takes place" between these five groups of islands (2). For instance, the Reunionnais story of "Marie Zozeh" was collected in Mauritius and has a Mauritian allusion. Mixing allowed borrowing from other traditions, made people aware of their own cultural heritage, and means constant discussion about cultural identity. Haring notes that in nationalistic periods, those searching for cultural roots often used folklore as a tool for nation-building (e.g., Ireland, Finland, Bangladesh), but that narrow nationalistic or communitarian notions of "cultural purity" and of exclusive "ownership" of cultural materials, used as "badges of identity," are mythical and misguided, for all cultures are mixed cultures (3-4). Nevertheless, quests for identity by the island nations has lead some of them to take folklore collection seriously, notably the Comoros and Seychelles (see 39, 117, 142). Haring's collection could have included more information on local attitudes over time to cultural preservation, borrowing, and ethnic/cultural distinctness; on the proportion of stable tale-types to "new and unpredictable pieces" created by migration, as in the Comoros; and on the basis for the selection of tales. In a firmly bonded community such as in this region, an old person transmits community values to youth through folklore. However, across generations "often the only sharing that takes place is the [. . .] tale," and folklore transmission is "no longer the passing of pure tradition from one generation to another" (4)-if it ever was. Haring stresses folktale hybridity and mutation over languages, ethnicities, space and time; decries myths of "unbroken transmission;" and celebrates new modes of transmission of folk materials such as radio storytelling. Since latter-day islanders consult books for a memory of tradition, Haring sees the digressions and additions of a radio storyteller to folktale-based stories as resembling the practice of village storytellers. …

Abstract: The Emperor's Old Groove: Decolonizing Disney's Magic Kingdom. Edited by Brenda Ayres. New York: Peter Lang, 2003. 203 pp. The last decade has seen a proliferation of critical collections focused on the Disney empire, signaling, perhaps, that Western culture's defensive loveaffair with the Disney product is finally on the wane. Brenda Ayres's collection is firmly in the tradition set by Bell, Haas, and Sells's From Mouse to Mermaid (1995) or Eric Smoodins Disney Discourse (1994): a reasonably eclectic collection of essays on various aspects of Disney's film and corporate culture. Inevitably, the tendency for any critical collection to swing wildly between poles of discourse, theory, and quality is exaggerated by the breadth of Disney's cultural artifact and by the often widely differing critical backgrounds from which critics of Disney hail. Ayres's collection finds some kind of focus by stating its intention to be "a series of close readings of individual animated films. ... a close, careful look at the very heart of Disney" (3). It thus offers more concentrated textual concerns than do Bell et al, who include live action films from Touchstone and Hollywood Pictures, or Smoodin's collection, which includes considerable analysis of the theme parks. The focus on animation is productive, underlining the extent to which it is the animated icons which define Disney to its consumers, and the animated films which define the ideological and cultural construction of the familiar images. At the same time, the limitation leads to a certain smoothing of theme, suggested by the collection's section topics-Family, Women, Culture, Literature, History. While certain essays stand out, the overall effect of both the sectioning and the bulk of the essays is a faint but persistent sense of deja vu; despite the disparity of critical approaches, they at times echo not only each other, but the general themes and insights of earlier collections. Disney scholarship, it would seem, is moving towards some kind of canonical consensus; The Emperor's Old Groove is exactly that. The sense of an accepted canon of Disney insight is strengthened in the collection by the degree to which individual essays take for granted the scholarly historicity of their approach. "Disneyfication" has apparently become an accepted critical term, used straight-faced and without explanation. Few essays offer any contextualization of Disney as cultural monolith, launching in many cases into an analysis of cultural imperialism or problematical ideology in a particular film, without pausing to define in any depth the terms in which the monolith constructs itself. The effect is curiously unbalanced: the essays on the whole do not acknowledge, other than in passing, the essential tension between Disney's popularity as innocent, family entertainment and the ideological minefield which underpins that smug surface. Ayres's Acknowledgments and Epilogue bookend the essays with a slightly shamefaced admission of pleasure in the Disney product, but none of the essays address this issue in any depth. …

Abstract: Marchen und Meta-Marchen: Zur Poetik der "Volksmarchen der Deutschen" von Johann Karl August Musaus. By Malgorzata Kubisiak. Ingelheim am Rhein: litblockin, 2002. 180 pp. Musaus's collection Volksmarchen der Deutschen (Folktales of the Germans, 1782-86, 5 vols.) has presented a problem for scholarship for most of its existence. It is one of the earliest collections of its kind in German, and so has for some a status as original and foundational: it is often cited as a, or even the, precursor of the Grimms' Kinder- und Hausmarchen. Yet the comparison can only be to the ultimate detriment of the earlier work; Musaus, thus seen, is a careless folklorist (avant la lettre, of course) who failed to catch the "real" voice of the people the way the Grimms supposedly did. The fourteen tales are described as having a hybrid form between Kunstmarchen and Volksmarchen (despite the title Musaus gave it), failing to fulfill the expectations of either genre (or at least of the post-Grimm expectations of them). As an Enlightenment writer conveying-authentically or not-the wisdom (or superstitions) of the people, Musaus's position was from the first suspect: how is it possible for a proponent of rational thought to make use of such popular material and stay true to his enlightened ideas? His style is very far from the simple narratives of peasants or of the less-educated bourgeoisie: he is witty and clever; his diction is creative and whimsical; he makes constant reference to topical events by means of humorous comparisons and metaphors. Some of the tales have very little magic or marvelous in them, and the occurrence of the marvelous is met with by a great deal of ambivalence, or at least by a lack of clarity, on the part of the narrator. Although marvels are never explained away by enlightened rational science, a rational attitude is just as likely to prove the correct one in a tale by Musaus as is the simple unquestioning acceptance of the magic of the world. Humor is often used to debunk magic in one scene of a tale where elsewhere magic has proved "real": Franz Melcherson, reports the narrator jocosely, does not need any magical accoutrements to retrieve the hidden treasure in "Stumme Liebe" ("Silent Love"), but only a shovel and spade: yet Franz knows of the treasure only because, earlier in the tale, a ghost he has released from a curse told him what to do to find it. Thus, it is difficult for the reader quite to know what to make of the purpose of the tales. Are they meant only to entertain, and to be understood simply as old tales in modern, and higher-class, dress? Or is there a moral to be drawn? If there is, it is not explicit, and it is also unclear. Should one spurn superstition in favor of modern science, or should one take on the happy-golucky attitude of the fairy-tale hero to whom all things come if only he accepts the gift freely? In her book, Malgorzata Kubisiak touches upon all these issues, and more: the history and import of fairy-tale writing in the Enlightenment (or Rococo); peasant versus bourgeois tales; the function of and attitude toward the magical in this literature; the relationship of entertainment value to moral value in the tales; reason versus fantasy; tales as telling the truth or telling lies; the existence of a folk tradition underlying the collections published by Musaus and others. In regard particularly to Musaus, she has material on his humorous style, with its satiric and idyllic components; on his expressed attitude (very dismissive!) to the Ammenmarchen (old wives' tales) he heard and wrote down; on the reception and interpretation of the Volksmarchen der Deutschen since their publication. This volume represents, in fact, a thorough collection of comments on Musaus and his collection, from the 1780s to the present day. Because there is very little analysis of the comments she thus records, it is difficult to ascertain what the author wishes to bring new into the academic debate. …

Abstract: The Annotated Classic Fairy Tales. Edited with an introduction and notes by Maria Tatar. Translations by Maria Tatar. New York: WW Norton & Company, 2002. xxi + 445 pp. The Annotated Classic Fairy Tales \s such a gorgeous book that it is hard to be critical. Its dust jacket, featuring magenta lettering and geometric design on a golden background with miniature illustrations from fairy tales on each corner, heralds the "storytellmg archive" within its covers through allusions to Arabian Nights arabesque and to manuscript illumination. Editor Maria Tatar has chosen to present 26 classic fairy tales with over 300 accompanying classic illustrations to highlight the golden age of the fairy tale in the Western tradition. "The Tales" section of the book includes familiar texts ranging from those of Charles Perrault, Jeanne-Marie Leprince de Beaumont, Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm, Alexander Afanasev, Peter Christen Asbjornsen and Jorgen Moe, Joseph Jacobs, Philipp Otto Runge to those of Hans Christian Andersen (17-330). It is in Tatars annotations for each tale, however, that the "familiar" is cracked open and explored intricately but clearly for an implied general audience of parents, children, students, and others interested in the subject matter through innovative use of different type faces, font sizes and colors. Each tale's number; its title in capital letters, such as tale 1, LITTLE RED RIDING HOOD, or tale 18, KATE CRACKERNUTS; its specific author in italics, such as Charles Perrault or Hans Christian Andersen; and its footnotes on the page margins are all printed in light but readable purple ink that matches the geometric border of white vines on purple ground which heads each new tale. Small black print at the bottom left-hand side of each tale's first page announces that the source for this version of the tale is from Charles Perrault, "Cendrillon ou la petite pantoufle de verre," in Histoires ou contes du temps passe, avec des moralites (Paris: Barbin, 1697) or from Joseph Jacobs, "Kate Crackernuts," English Fairy Tales (London: David Nutt, 1898), for example. The text of each tale itself is in larger black print while Tatar's headnote introducing each tale is in black italics. Illustrations from different artists, some in color and some in black and white, are placed throughout each tale text with captions indicating the specific lines or scenes in the tales from which the artists drew inspiration with accompanying commentaries by the editor. Tatar's headnotes, footnotes, and illustration captions are informative, clearly drawn from a wide range of scholarly sources, her own among others, but are not academic per se. For instance, her introduction to tale 11, "Bluebeard," draws from comparative studies that she had already referenced in the 1999 Norton critical edition, The Classic Fairy Tales: "Known as Silver Nose in Italy and as the Lord of the Underworld in Greece, the French Bluebeard has many folkloric cousins" (145). Her headnote also condenses scholarly shifts in academic interpretations of the Bluebeard tale: "The Bluebeard story has traditionally been seen as turning on the curiosity of the wife, who can never 'resist' the temptation to look into the chamber forbidden to her. . . . Rather than celebrating the courage and wisdom of Bluebeard's wife in discovering the dreadful truth about her husband's murderous deeds, Perrault and many other tellers of the tale disparage her unruly act of insubordination" (146). Here, Tatar appears to draw on, but downplays, her chapter, "Taming the Beast: Bluebeard and Other Monsters," in her 1987 The Hard Facts of the Grimms' Fairy Tales, still one of the best feminist rereadings of fairytale scholarship. In another example, Tatar introduces tale 8, "The Frog King, or Iron Heinrich," as the first in the Grimms' Nursery and Household Tales, then refers explicitly to Bruno Bettelheim's psychoanalytical reading of the tale "as a compressed version of the maturation process, with the princess navigating a path between the pleasure principle (represented by her play) and the dictates of the superego (represented by the father's commands)," then shows how Bettelheim's reading "helps to understand why the tale has such a powerful combination of erotic and didactic elements" (115-16). …

Abstract: Boys and Girls Forever: Children's Classics from Cinderella to Harry Potter. By Alison Lune. New York: Penguin Books, 2003. 219 pp. This collection of fourteen essays makes a useful companion and sequel to Lurie's earlier collection Don't Tell the Grown-ups: Subversive Children's Literature (1990). Most the essays first appeared in slightly different form in the New York Review of Books or as essay reviews in The New York Times Book Review. Like her previous collection which tied a wide range of essays together under the broad thesis that outstanding examples of children's texts tend to be subversive, or at least run counter to the status quo, Lune provides a general umbrella introduction which argues that some of the most gifted writers for children are those authors who were able to remain children throughout their adulthood, or who preferred children to adults as companions, despite their chronological age. The essays on J. M. Barrie and E. Nesbit that were published in Don't Tell the Grown-ups would be more appropriate in Boys and Girls Forever, just as the essays on Louisa May Alcott and Dr. Seuss in this collection would thematically fit the thesis of the first volume. Both collections of independent essays have grown a bit like Topsy evolving out of Lurie's own reading and research interests which is both part of their charm and limitations. Those seeking a more systematic approach to children's literature are advised to look elsewhere. While viewing successful children's writers as adults who never grew up is not the most original critical thesis, it does provide Lurie with a useful frame for examining distinctive writers such as Hans Christian Andersen, L. Frank Baum, Dr. Seuss and Tove Jansson. The focus of the collection is children's literature, but at least a third of the essays deal with authors of literary fairy tales. Perhaps the most useful essay in the collection for those interested in fairy tales is "What Fairy Tales Tell Us" which first appeared as an introduction to The Oxford Book of Modern Fairy Tales (1993). Here Lurie makes a distinction between those literary fairy tales produced in the United States and their European counterparts. She views European literary fairy tales as occurring in a fixed world where the social system remains unchanged, while American fairy tales frequently critique the existing social order and have little to recommend wealth, position, and good looks. Lurie develops these distinctions in more detail in "The Oddness of Oz" written in recognition of the one hundredth anniversary of the publication of Baum's The Wonderful Wizard of Oz (1900). She shows how Baum's fairy tale reflects the geographic landscape and cultural values of the United States. She argues that Baum was strongly influenced by the political thought of his mother-in-law Matida Gage, who posited a prehistoric matriarchal society in her Woman, Church and State (1895). Lurie observes that in the Oz series all the good societies are ruled by women and that more often than not the male rulers are either wicked or weak. The land of Oz is ruled by a female trinity of Glinda, Ozma, and Dorothy. These female characters make a sharp break with European children's fantasy as well as the many realistic characters found in books for girls of the same period. Lurie maintains these innovations are what have attracted a strong readership of girls for the Oz series. Lurie finds a similar strand of strong female characters in Jansson's Moomintroll books which she contrasts with the more male-dominated world of A. …