Description
Book SynopsisSince the beginning of the nineteenth century folklorists, and the general public in their wake, have assumed the orality of fairy tales. Only lately have more and more specialists been arguing in favour of at least an interdependence between oral and printed distribution of stories.
This book takes an extreme position in that debate: as far as Tales of magic is concerned, the initial transmission proceded exclusively through prints. From a historical perspective, this is the only viable approach; the opposite assumption of a vast unrecorded and thus inaccessible reservoir of oral stories, presents a horror vacui. Only in the course of the nineteenth century, when folklorists started collecting in the field and asked their informants for fairy tales, was this particular genre incorporated into a then feeble oral tradition. Even then story tellers regularly reverted to printed texts. Every recorded fairy tale can be shown to be dependent on previous publications, or to be a new
Trade Review
Focusing on the collections of the Brothers Grimm, Willem de Blécourt admirably challenges this view, adducing an impressive amount of scholarly research in his new book, Tales of Magic, Tales in Print. -- .
Table of Contents
Acknowledgments
The magic of the printed word: a prologue
1. The devil in the detail
2. A quest for rejuvenation
3. The girl in the garden
4. Magic and metamorphosis
5. The substitute story teller
6. Journeys to the other world
7. The vanishing godmother
Epilogue: towards a theory of talecraft
A very short bibliography
Tale type index
Index
