Hugely renewed interest, yes, and very much in academe, too. It’s because she’s an absolutely extraordinarily good writer. People are recognizing it – her writing is just astonishingly lively, and rich, and her thought hasn’t aged. She’s very fresh and agile in her thinking. She was a tremendous freethinker in the best possible way. Well-known Japanese "fairy tale" [a] are often found in the Otogi-zōshi or the Konjaku Monogatarishū. a b c d e f g h i j k l m n o p q Anonymous (1860). The Royal Hibernian Tales; Being 4 Collections of the Most Entertaining Stories Now Extant. Dublin: C.M. Warren. The Panchatantra – Story 30 The Brahmin and the Goat". An eye for everything. 21 August 2017 . Retrieved 23 August 2023.

The Grimms come over a hundred years later. They start collecting in the early 1800s, and publish the first edition of their Children’s and Household Tales 1812, in Germany. There had been a trace already in Perrault of a nationalist strand – you know, “these are French tales, national tales”, popular tales not classical ones with gods and goddesses,- a home-grown literature – but this tendency grows very much stronger in the early 19th century. The Grimms’ collection is exemplary in that – emphasising the local,native born culture, communicated in the vernacular and sometimes even in dialect. Not High German – that was a key part of the project. Lieberman, M. R. (1972). “Some Day My Prince Will Come”: Female Acculturation through the Fairy Tale. College English, 34, 13. It’s a very interesting reflection on the inability of systems to crush human emotion, which, I think, literature expresses. So one of the important things about making up stories and writing things down is that you create a record of all the possible human expressions and emotions and you understand their calibrations and subtleties and their complexities. I wouldn’t know half of what I know if I didn’t read about it – I’m not that good at noticing myself. I need other people to notice for me. Fiction can do that. It’s an amazing seismograph. When I first started reading the Brontës or George Eliot, for instance, I learnt so much about how people interact. Vom wandernden Zigeunervolke. Bilder aus dem Leben der Siebenbürger Zigeuner. Geschichtliches, Ethnologisches, Sprache und PoesieZipes, J. (2011). The Meaning of Fairy Tale within the Evolution of Culture. Marvels & Tales: Journal of Fairy-Tale Studies, 25, 221-243. Unsurprisingly, fairytales vary wildly from continent to continent, country to county. Your next book comes from Italy: Italo Calvino’s Italian Folk Tales (l956), translated by George Martin (published by Penguin in l980). In 2000 it became a Penguin Classic. It’s interesting, in light of what you were saying earlier, that it was commissioned by the publisher to answer the question, ‘Is there an Italian equivalent of the Brothers Grimm?’

Before we move on to your final book, Naomi Mitchison is another key figure we should mention. The Fourth Pig, first published in 1936, being her best-known work. How important is she to the genre and its modern mutations? Followed by Cinderella (1950), Sleeping Beauty (1959), The Little Mermaid (1989), and Beauty and the Beast (1991), Walt Disney retold the tales through animation and film with such consummate skill that they became the authoritative modern versions ( Inge, 2004). At the same time, he reshaped the fairy tales to reflect his utopian vision of the good women and good life. For example, Disney’s heroines are passive and pretty and usually patient, obedient, diligent, who treat animals like children, creating a sense of domestic harmony ( Stone, 1975). It reflects the traditional public attitude toward the place of women in Western culture, as portraying princesses as passive vessels of innocence and virtue. Moreover, Disney is emphatic in its depiction of good triumphing over evil. Eventually, the evil lousy person is punished, and the innocent good person is rewarded ( Wasko, 2001). Love and devotion, fun, and happiness are consistent ideologies projected in Disney’s reception of fairy-tale animations and films. Haase, D. (1993a). The Reception of Grimm’s Fairy Tales: Responses, Reactions, Revisions. Wayne State University Press.James, Montague Rhodes]] (ed.) London: George Bell & Sons, Retrieved from Project Gutenberg 8 May 2018

Jauss, H. R. (2005). Reflections on the Chapter “Modernity” in Benjamin’s Baudelaire Fragments. In P. Osborne (Ed.), Walter Benjamin: Critical Evaluations in Cultural Theory (Vol. 2, pp. 110-117). Routledge. Colum, Padraic (1916). The King of Ireland's Son. New York: H. Holt and Company. Retrieved from Project Gutenberg via [1] 24 November 2017. Yes, I’ve become increasingly captivated by the idea first put forward by James Simpson, the historian of the Bible, who said that far from the arrival of the Bible in print being an emancipation of the people, it actually imprisoned them in the imprimatur, in the idea of a canonical text. Fairy tales are high fantasy based on stories that are not only not true, but that couldn't possibly be true, while Legends are sometimes perceived as real or plausible. Fairy tales may merge into legends, where the narrative is perceived both by teller and hearers as being grounded in historical truth. However, unli Fairy tale is a type of short narrative that typically features such folkloric characters, such as fairies, goblins, elves, trolls, dwarves, giants or gnomes, and usually magic or enchantments. However, only a small number of the stories thus designated explicitly refer to fairies. Smith, K. P. (2007). The Postmodern Fairytale: Folkloric Intertexts in Contemporary Fiction. Palgrave Macmillan.a b c d e f g h i Young, Ella (1910). Celtic Wonder-Tales. Dublin: Maunsel & Company Ltd. Retrieved 22 November 2017.