Off With Their Heads!: Fairy Tales and the Culture of Childhood - Rilegato

Tatar, Maria

Rilegato

ISBN 10: 0691069433 ISBN 13: 9780691069432

Casa editrice: Princeton Univ Pr, 1992

Riassunto

When fairy tales moved from workrooms, taverns, and the fireside into the nursery, they not only lost much of their irreverent, earthy humor but were also deprived of their contestatory stance to official culture. Children's literature, Maria Tatar maintains, has always been more intent on producing docile minds than playful bodies. From its inception, it has openly endorsed a productive discipline that condemns idleness and disobedience along with most forms of social resistance. In this book she explores how Perrault, the Grimms, and others reshaped fairy tales to produce conciliatory literary texts that dedicate themselves to the project of socializing the child.
Tatar finds that when we read and interpret fairy tales today, we often fall into the trap of positioning children as the real villians of the tales. Authorities such as Bruno Bettelheim, for example, focus on "Hansel and Gretel" as a story about the "destructive desires," "uncontrolled cravings," and "ambivalent feelings" of the protagonists rather than as a story about adult hostility toward children. After examining how fairy tales were converted into children's literature, the author investigates the acculturation of heroines in such stories as "Cinderella" and "Beauty and the Beast" and concludes with meditations on violence, cannibalism, and conflicts between parents and children.
Since the cultural stories we read to children in their "formative years" have a powerful influence on their lives, Tatar emphasizes the importance of interrogating and reinterpreting these bedtime tales.

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Recensione:

Winner of the 1992 Book Prize in Literature, German Studies Association
"As provocative and stimulating as her The Hard Facts of the Grimms' Fairy Tales, this book should give a salutary shock to everyone who brings children and tales together, convincing them that "every interpretation is a rewriting' and encouraging them "to identify what is transmitted in the stories we tell children.'"--Library Journal

Contenuti:

	List of Illustrations
	Preface
I	Rewritten by Adults: The Inscription of Children's Literature	3
II	"Teaching Them a Lesson": The Pedagogy of Fear in Fairy Tales	22
III	Just Desserts: Reward-and-Punishment Tales	51
IV	Wilhelm Grimm/Maurice Sendak: Dear Mili and the Art of Dying Happily Ever After	70
V	Daughters of Eve: Fairy-Tale Heroines and Their Seven Sins	94
VI	Tyranny at Home: "Catskin" and "Cinderella"	120
VII	Beauties and Beasts: From Blind Obedience to Love at First Sight	140
VIII	"As Sweet as Love": Violence and the Fulfillment of Wishes	163
IX	Table Matters: Cannibalism and Oral Greed	190
X	Telling Differences: Parents vs. Children in "The Juniper Tree"	212
	Epilogue: Reinvention through Intervention	229
	Notes	239
	Select Bibliography	273
	Index	289

Su questa edizione

• Editore: Princeton Univ Pr
• Data di pubblicazione: 1992
• ISBN 10: 0691069433
• ISBN 13: 9780691069432
• Rilegatura: Copertina rigida
• Numero di pagine: 295