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rituals. These reductive connections between simple stories and listening audiences have also caused scholars to conflate the neat simplicity of a fairy-tale plot with the process a listener or reader goes through whilst making meaning from the story, thereby making the process of making meaning also simple. Making meaning when listening to a text is not simple. Whilst listening is not simplicity to reading’s complexity, then, it is important to stress that when ‘oral’ texts (especially in this concentration) are written into a small ‘miscellany’, then those issues of
terms of light and darkness; illuminated manuscripts and heraldry contrast with dark dungeons and superstitions. A gulf separates the Pre-Raphaelites’ Middle Ages, peopled by bright-faced youths and damsels, and the sinister scenes recounted in the fairy tales of the brothers Grimm. Despite all the public lectures and books of John Ruskin and William Morris idealising the Middle Ages, their view remained that of an aristocratic elite. At some undefined time in the nineteenth century the adjective ‘medieval’ entered popular consciousness as a description of anything
The evil reputation of stepmothers is among those social phenomena that transcend space and time. The Greeks and Romans already included the ‘stepmother-poisoner’ among stereotypes of wicked women. Walahfrid Strabo’s noverca venefica in the ninth century replicated Seneca’s in the second. Fairy tales like ‘Cinderella’, ‘Snow-White’ and ‘Hansel and Gretel’ represented stepmothers as murderesses and witches. 1 Step-families were hybrids in sociological terms, and in political terms, they were firmly labelled ‘secondary’, since the children of the two pairs of
to Fascism’s abuses of power through dramatising, in Blasetti’s words, an ‘aversion to violence, conquest, and sterile power’. 29 In contrast to Condottieri ’s monumentalism, La corona di ferro adopts the form of a fairy tale to create an allegory of the illegitimate uses of authority, offering a different perspective on historicising. Blasetti was an innovative director, editor and scenarist
creation is Lewis Hyde's The Gift , first published in 1979. Hyde argues for the value that gifts bring to social life and the imagination. He identifies traditional stories and fairy tales as particularly powerful descriptions of the gift in operation, creating long-term bonds between people, returning in unexpected or transformational ways, and providing a challenge to traditional economic understandings of commodity exchange. Hyde additionally finds the generative capacity of the gift in artists’ understanding of inspiration, especially in Walt Whitman's stance that
you his journey rightly, entirely from the beginning, what his origins may be’.] This command to uncover the devil’s origins does not appear in the Passio S. Iulianae or the Acta . 45 Cynewulf’s modification makes Juliana’s endeavour to expose the demon’s ‘æþelu’ (origins) a divinely sanctioned act of recovery; narration thus becomes part of the process of expelling the demon from her presence. Scholars have observed that this episode modulates between a variety of genres, ranging from penitentials to fairy tales. Allen Frantzen has argued that the poem
, with a sunken seating area, animal skins, and scatter-cushions’. 45 Vanessa Redgrave, as Guinevere, is costumed throughout the film in 1967 fashions and presides over a Maying scene that looks like a ‘hippie picnic’, in Aronstein’s words. 46 When her preposterous fairy-tale coach stops in a drift of artificial snow, she asks for a cup of tea, an anachronism very much in the spirit of White’s book, in which the
renders Christiania and its environs nearly ethereal extensions of the nature that surrounds them. Coxe and his companions stand in ‘raptures’ as they view the fertility, beauty, riches, and – as if in a fairy tale – ‘eternal snow’ and ‘glow of the atmosphere’. Whatever aesthetic value Christiania has comes not from any urban achievement but from the sea on one side and from the city’s seamless connection to the landscape, which slopes to it, on the other. A continuity like this makes a moot point of the smells that overwhelm Burton and Baring-Gould in Reykjavík