Traditional Tales Research Articles

The characteristics and compilation background of the three collections of traditional fairy tales in Colonial Choson

The characteristics and compilation background of the three collections of traditional fairy tales in Colonial Choson

Katherine Mansfield's Suburban Fairy Tale Gothic

Explorations of ways in which literary modernists use the Gothic only rarely consider the work of Katherine Mansfield among other women writers of the period. However, Mansfield's stories often use defamiliarisation, a popular feature of the Gothic which moves readers through estrangement to see situations and people anew. Mansfield's use of the Gothic can be seen to expose and explore social relationships and states of being, and do so using a rich mixture of narrative formulae and techniques, influenced by fairy tales and myth. This essay considers such techniques in a range of Mansfield's short stories and poems, before focusing on the story ‘A Suburban Fairy Tale’, which builds on the traditional tale of the changeling to expose selfishness, hypocrisy, suburban complacencies, self-deception and culpable child neglect.

Good Little Wolf by N. Shireen

Shireen, Nadia. Good Little Wolf. New York: Alfred A Knopf. 2011. Print. Good Little Wolf is British illustrator Nadia Shireen’s picture book debut, and a successful one at that. Shireen, who earned an MA in Children’s Book Illustration from Angela Ruskin University in Cambridge, originally planned a career in law but thankfully pursued her passion for illustration and now, authorship. The story begins with the narrator ensuring a group of youngsters, including a red-hooded girl and a (soother) suckling pig are all comfortable. Rolf is a good little wolf. He is helpful to his friends, the elderly Mrs. Boggins and Little Pig, eats his vegetables and enjoys baking. One day Rolf meets a Big Bad Wolf, who is clearly surprised by Rolf’s goodness; young children will delight at the Big Bad Wolf sniffing Rolf’s butt to confirm that he is, indeed, a wolf. A few tests are in order to determine his wolf-ness and Rolf fails miserably – until the Big Bad Wolf shows up with Mrs. Boggins and a fork. Suddenly Rolf shows his fierce side and the Big Bad Wolf is going to reform – or so it seems. The quirky illustrations and fresh take on a traditional tale will delight the 4-8 crowd, though parents may need to do some explaining after the final twist when we learn the identity of the narrator . I look forward to Shireen’s next book and won’t have to wait long – “Hey, Presto!” is due out this summer. Recommended: 3 out of 4 stars Reviewer: Debbie FeisstDebbie is a Public Services Librarian at the H.T. Coutts Education Library at the University of Alberta. When not renovating, she enjoys travel, fitness and young adult fiction.

Natchez Cannibal Speech

Between 1934 and 1936, Mary R. Haas did extensive fieldwork on the Natchez language, which was near death, with only two fluent speakers remaining. However, they both maintained a tradition of verbal art, and Watt Sam, with his extensive repertoire consisting of traditional Natchez tales and ones translated out of Creek and Cherokee, was a master storyteller. Mary Haas’s intensive efforts resulted in the collection of dozens of examples of Natchez oral literature. One of the features of this literature was a special speech register for cannibal characters, which was a form of Natchez with distinctive morphological and lexical characteristics.

Fieldwork in Soqotra: The Formation of a Practitioner's Sensibility

In this article, I undertake a sort of intellectual biography of my fieldwork among Soqotrans as a kind of "participant objectivation," hopefully without falling into the idiosyncratic self-exploration of the traditional confessional tale from the field. The aim is to describe my emancipation from the gamut of awkward sentiments that inform the "congenial orthodoxies" of ethnographic research and the subsequent formation of my practitioner's sensibility. The latter term is not to be associated with a guilt-driven empathy or humanitarian pity engendered by the perceived privations of the "other" relative to "us" that inform much of our ethnographic encounters and representations; rather, it refers to an intellectual and affective disposition toward fieldwork that is molded through a keen responsiveness to field interlocutors' practical interests.

The Orphan and the Polar Bear by S. Qaunaq

Qaunaq, Sakiasi. The Orphan and the Polar Bear. Iqaluit: Inhabit Media, Inc., 2011. Print.One of the common themes in Inuit stories is that of the orphan child alone on the land. In this version, told by Arctic Bay elder Sakiasi Qalinaq, who learned his stories from his grandmother, the orphan is abandoned by hunters from his village and adopted by a village of polar bears. The bears teach him to hunt and survive on the land and, when he is grown, return him to his people. The image on the cover of the book showing the child riding the polar bear is an iconic one. This mythological relationship between child and polar bear is also found in non-Inuit literature, most notably in Philip Pullman’s The Golden Compass. In the bears’ village the orphan is trained to hunt and survive on the land. The bears also teach him their traditional wisdom. For example, when one of the bears wants to go “push down” some humans because they “look so silly standing on their skinny legs”, a wiser elder bear says, “Never talk that way…don’t make humans our enemy. Stay clear of them and their camps.” The book is primarily a picture-book. Unlike many of the other books of Inuit legends published by Inhabit Media, the pictures are not scary. Rather they are quite beautiful. The extra width of the landscape format gives artist, Eva Widermann, the opportunity to spread her illustrations across two pages reflecting the wide expanses of the Arctic. Text usually takes up one corner or a few lines of a page. Widermann’s images are realistic. However, because this story is from a time when animals could shape-shift into human form, she sometimes gives the bears human postures and gestures. For example, in the image on page 15, the polar bear is standing with a harpoon grasped in its front paws, handing it to the orphan. Bears are also shown in their human form in three images. In the image on page 20, depicting the inside of an igloo in the bears’ village, a woman with human form is tending the fire.Overall this is a lovely rendition of the story. While designed for an elementary school audience, anyone with an interest in traditional Arctic tales will enjoy it. Recommended for elementary schools and public libraries. Recommendation: 4 out of 4 starsReviewer: Sandy CampbellSandy is a Health Sciences Librarian at the University of Alberta, who has written hundreds of book reviews across many disciplines. Sandy thinks that sharing books with children is one of the greatest gifts anyone can give.

Hans My Hedgehog: A Tale From the Brothers Grimm (review)

Reviewed by: Hans My Hedgehog: A Tale From the Brothers Grimm Hope Morrison Coombs, Kate, ad. Hans My Hedgehog: A Tale From the Brothers Grimm; ad. by Kate Coombs; illus. by John Nickle. Atheneum, 2012. [40p]. ISBN 978-1-4169-1533-1 $16.99 Reviewed from galleys Ad 6–9 yrs. A farmer and his wife, long childless, welcome a child into the world who is half human and half hedgehog and name him Hans My Hedgehog. As a young man playing his beloved music in the woods, he has two encounters with kings who have lost their way; each time, he offers to help in exchange for the first thing that meets the king upon returning home, and each time, a princess meets the king. The first king chooses to ignore the promise; Hans subsequently sets his band of pigs loose to destroy his castle. The second king vows to keep the promise, and he and his daughter welcome Hans into their family. In the midst of the wedding celebration, the enchantment is broken and Hans is magically transformed into a complete man. This lesser-known tale from the Brothers Grimm, loosely adapted here, is an intriguing one, but some gaps in logic and explanation compromise the storyline; it’s especially baffling that there’s no justification for Hans’ transformation. Nickle’s art is similarly mixed; his acrylic illustrations, densely saturated in hue but delicately modeled in hedgehog spines and other details, gives the animals an interesting combination of vivid realism and fantastical action, but the humans are stiff and ungainly. This adaptation offers a unique opportunity to share an unfamiliar traditional tale, however, so true folktale fans may want to have a listen. A note explains the changes Coombs made to the story. Copyright © 2012 The Board of Trustees of the University of Illinois

Death in Portuguese Literature for Children and Young People

Up the 1970s and 1980s, Portuguese society, most notably in rural areas, did not conceal from the young the realities of ageing and the death of loved ones. Today these are effectively prohibited topics, and many children therefore grow up without any knowledge of death. But this shortcoming in the education of the young can in part be overcome by reading literary works such as those analysed in this article. Drawing on a wide range of stories and verses, both creative retellings of traditional tales and more markedly original writings, we see how modern Portuguese authors such as Antnio Mota and ´lvaro Magalhes are able to discuss death in a way that is accessible, and helpful, to children.

Fictions d’histoire littéraire ed. by Jean-Louis Jeannelle

on the compulsive one-to-one correspondence with which many generations associated the form. Freed from the strictures of direct correspondence, modern allegory becomes “a form that allows literary texts to engage with abstract systems, or fragments of abstract systems, so as to generate meanings that bring us into contact with these systems” (23). Thus understood, allegory becomes structurally analogous to the method of the via negativa, in that both become productive means of expressing the unsayable, of finding meaning in what in itself remains, as it were, unnamable. While Uhlmann most explicitly tackles these two paths toward understanding Beckett, many of the volume’s remaining essays might be called implicit examples of what Uhlmann calls “negative allegory” (25), or the production of meaning out of the apparent sign of its absence. Uhlmann’s formulation is remarkable , as such apparent absence of meaning remains, after all, the defining hermeneutic difficulty of Beckett’s work, still so opaque after decades of furious scholarship. And so we have here, to mention the volume’s most provoking instances , James Knowlson’s account of Beckett’s lifelong fascination with seventeenth -century Dutch painting, John Pilling’s eye-opening study of Beckett’s relationship to the fairy tale tradition, Dirk Van Hulle’s article on the structure of chiasmus throughout Beckett, and Angela Moorjani’s wonderful study of the role played by André Gide in shaping Beckett’s fiction of the 1930s. These are highly original essays by some of Beckett’s most formidable critics, unpacking many facets of Beckett’s work as yet unrecognized in existing scholarship. As the journal reflects on its origins, it also, in these essays, gestures toward new and challenging roads yet to be taken in the world of Beckett studies. This volume’s promise of “where never before” comes at precisely the right time, just as the field seemed as if it might be running out of new things to say. Emory University (GA) Jacob Hovind JEANNELLE, JEAN-LOUIS, éd. Fictions d’histoire littéraire. Rennes: PU de Rennes, 2009. ISBN 978-2-7535-0747-0. Pp. 303. 18 a. Begun as a proposal at the Sorbonne in 2004 by Antoine Compagnon for a literary history composed by fiction writers, the project of this volume involves seventeen contributors who posit fiction writing as questioning literary history. Their contributions are organized under four major headings: authorial fictions, critical fictions, “microfictions,” and genre variations. In addition, Jeannelle provides contexts for their essays in the preface with his formulation of the large questions at stake in this metamorphosis of the quarrel of the Ancients and the Moderns. The afterword by Michel Murat is also noteworthy for tracing how fiction theoretically accomplishes modifications to literary history. Four essays comprise the section on authorial fictions. Most interesting is Marie Blaise in her portrayal of Mallarmé’s “crise de Tournon” as “l’une des grandes fictions littéraires du XXe siècle” (46). This “hagiographie sans Dieu” (46) of Mallarmé’s celebrated intellectual moment occurs through his use of a Romantic text ethos composing the author’s personality through a psychological crisis. In turn, Jean-François Jeandillou argues for instating the poetess Clotilde de Surville as a fifteenth-century author instead of the Marquis de Surville who as a late editor Reviews 951 of her work was wrongly credited as author of her poetry. Dominique Rabaté adds a broad-brushed overview repeating literary history as hagiography and its desacralization by subversive writers while Christine Baron, recalling the Barthes-Picard debates as symptomatic of the Ancients-Moderns confrontation, looks at cross-cultural writings representative of the stance toward a history not belonging to the writers sensing themselves trapped by it. Likewise, four essays compose the division on critical fictions. Mathilde Bombart focuses on Furetière’s case for allegory as social commentary, Larry Norman on how the English imported and varied the Quarrel of the Ancients and the Moderns in Swift’s Battle of the Books, Marielle Macé on Sartre’s arguments against the social existence of literature , and Claude Coste on how Chevillard’s novel L’œuvre posthume de Thomas Pilaster reminds us of Nabokov’s Pale Fire, Borges, and Henry James. The essays...

The Creation of a Legend

Legend: A traditional story sometimes popularly regarded as historical but unauthenticated.1Legends do not spring forth full grown from a vacuum. Typically, legends are based upon elements-oftentimes only barest shreds-of reality. In order to assess legend's legitimacy these bits and pieces of truth must be ferreted out. This process can also provide insight into origin of legend.The present inquiry is an attempt to determine authenticity of legend of Herman Schaefer's called home run, and especially flamboyant behaviors attributed to him immediately preceding and following his amazing hit. goal is to determine validity of legend's alleged events and, if possible, to ascertain their root sources.BackgroundAn often told baseball legend is that of Detroit's Germany Schaefer's pinch-hit walk-off home run. As traditional tale goes, before stepping into batter's box Schaefer boasted to crowd that he was baseball's premier batsman and was going to give a brilliant demonstration of his unmatched hitting ability. most extraordinary version of legend has him publicly declaring that he was going to hit ball into left-field bleachers. Amazingly, Germany proceeded to do that and his spectacular home run won game. legend then details a series of outrageous behaviors exhibited by Schaefer as he rounded bases, concluding with a self-satisfied speech he made to crowd after arriving at home plate. Apart from those shocking acts, Schaefer's climactic homer is all more improbable because he simply was not a home run hitter. In his lengthy major league career, Germany batted more than 3,700 times and homered on only nine occasions, three of those inside-the-park homers.2The first writer to tell many-faceted tale of Schaefer's spectacular homer was former Tigers manager Hugh Jennings. At end of 1925 season Jennings suffered nervous breakdown and retired from baseball. He had been in major league baseball for nearly 35 years and, by his own estimate, had participated in or witnessed more than 5,000 games.3Jennings decided to capitalize on his wealth of baseball experience. He contracted to write a daily newspaper column, Rounding Third, which was syndicated in major newspapers from coast to coast. Atlanta Constitution proudly announced that the greatest series on baseball ever written would begin on Thursday, December 1, 1925.4 Jennings' column recounted important baseball events of past and depicted famous players he knew so well. All told, over a three-month period Jennings penned a total of 80 columns. mental and physical demands on a man in frail health must have been enormous.Launching LegendJennings first described Schaefer's pinch-hit home run in Chapter 28 of Rounding Third. He opened by saying, When we started our last eastern trip in September, 1907, we had a fighting chance for pennant. His description of Schaefer's pinchhit homer in this chapter was succinct:We were playing Chicago in Chicago and Doc White, famous left-hander of White Sox, was pitching. Schaefer was on bench that day, nursing a sore thumb. Late in game we filled bases with two out. I asked Schaefer whether he thought he could pinch bat and he said he would. He stepped to plate, took a firm hold, swung and drove ball into left field bleachers, winning game for us.Jennings devoted all of Chapter 53, Greatest Comedian of Baseball, to Germany Schaefer. In it, he detailed many of madcap stunts that earned Schaefer title The Clown Prince of Baseball. Here Jennings launched legend of Schaefer's pinch-hit home run in its full glory:I have already told you how Schaefer hit a home run off Doc White with bases filled in Chicago ... but circumstances attending home run were omitted in that chapter. …

Morality's Ugly Implications in Oscar Wilde's Fairy Tales

In Oscar Wilde's two volumes of fairy tales, "The Happy Prince" and Other Tales (1888) and A House of Pomegranates (1891), many central characters meet with premature death or physical disfigurement after learning a bourgeois moral lesson. In an attempt to explain this unconventional phenomenon in the fairy tale tradition, this essay examines Wilde's stories through the lens of his aesthetic ideology and demonstrates how the superficial morality of the Victorian bourgeoisie corrodes each tale's aesthetic integrity, causing the characters to either deny morality outright, assume the guise of Christian philanthropy, or die as the result of their moral reformation.

Fantasy and creative play

Provocations by their very nature are open-ended, which is why they are excellent when trying to encourage creative thought through imaginative play. Traditional tales are an ideal starting point.

Animals and nature: mapping storylines and metaphors in David Kramer’s narratives

This article discusses the representation of animals and nature in selected lyrics from the oeuvre of singer, songwriter and producer David Kramer and considers his engagement with historical and contemporary discourses about human-animal and human-nature interaction in relation to ecological awareness within a South African context. I trace the socio-political commentary voiced through his depiction of animals in the folksongs he wrote during apartheid, especially in lyrics from the album “Baboondogs” (Kramer, 1986). Kramer also employs intertextual references to traditional South African folksongs and tales in his music. Furthermore, the social and environmental significance of Kramer’s representations of nature in a selection of his postapartheid lyrics is investigated. I argue that the pedagogical value of Kramer’s cultural commentary can contribute significantly to the challenge of teaching animal studies and ecocriticism in South African context.

Multivocal Narrative and the Teacher as Narrator: The Case of Agnon's "Two Scholars Who Were In Our Town" (שני חלמידי חכמים שהיו בעיךו)

In this article, I seek to demonstrate how a hermeneutic of multivocal narration suggests several areas for educational inquiry. The dissonant styles and explicitly stated narrative development in Agnon's story, " Two Scholars Who Were in Our Town," suggest the presence of more than one type of narrative voice guiding the reader through the story. The core story is presented primarily as a traditional tale, handed-down orally from previous generations, whereas the story's broader framework can be considered a modern narrator's efforts to distance the reader from the tale (and from its storyteller). Agnon, thus, positions his modern narrator between the traditional storyteller and the reader. The core enigmatic tale is apparently too transgressive for the narrator as it seemingly dismantles his idealized reconstructed memory. The presence of two dissonant narrative voices suggests how narrative mediation functions in teaching and how modern fiction can provide a landscape for engaging students in ethical reflection that transcends a plot's illustration of normative principles.

Women's Work: Female Transmission of Mythical Narrative

The role of women storytellers and singers in promulgating classical myth in antiquity is, admittedly, difficult to determine, and some scholars dismiss entirely the notion that female popular narrative included traditional tales. When looked at in its entirety, however, the evidence strongly suggests that women told the same kinds of mythological tales—both to themselves and children—as those found in "higher" genres. This finding complicates the already difficult challenge of determining the lineage of mythological tales found in epic and tragedy, a complexity that Ovid may playfully acknowledge in his own collection of myth.

Contemporary English Interpretations of Traditional Russian Folk Tales

Contemporary English Interpretations of Traditional Russian Folk Tales

Introducing University Students to the Possibilities of Performing in the Community: A Case Study of Early Childhood Dramatic Performance

This paper is a case study outlining the processes undertaken by the presenter as the director of early childhood performances by first-year University students presented to children aged between 6 weeks and 5 years at St. Paul's Lutheran Child Care Centre in Brisbane, Australia. This paper will chronicle the process that students follow in order to create their performances to demonstrate the ways that the Academy can encourage students to become actively engaged in the presentation of the Arts within their own communities. In their first semester of study at Australian Catholic University students create their own performance of a picture book or traditional tale for pre-school children. The most important function of this early childhood performance activity is to help students to learn how to be active members of the wider community. Students are shown how to instil their passion for the theatre in the hearts of young children. In this performance context they share the roles of learner and teacher with me and they often are empowered to go on to more adventurous projects later in their academic careers and after their University studies.

Straparola: The Revolution That Was Not

Abstract Inspired by Ruth Bottigheimer’s 2002 book, Fairy Godfather: Straparola, Venice, and the Fairy Tale Tradition, this article examines her proposition that the sixteenth-century Italian author Giovanni Francesco Straparola invented the “rise tale,” in which a lowly hero or heroine climbs the socioeconomic ladder with the help of a magical benefactor. It investigates Bottigheimer’s evidence for this claim as well as her argument that Straparola’s literary invention was a projection of the emerging Italian middle class in the sixteenth century. Contrary to Bottigheimer’s proposition, it is found that tales with similar form were told in classical Greece and in medieval Europe and that the belief in magical fairies was known in Europe long before Straparola’s time.

Community languages, the arts and transformative pedagogy

Consistent with the goal to pass on heritage to the next generation, teachers of community languages always build a strong cultural focus into their teaching. This often includes an arts dimension, such as work around festivals and traditional tales. This article, based on qualitative research in four London schools in 2009-10, explores different ways of incorporating an arts focus into community language teaching and the importance such work has for the children’s learning and confidence.

Introduction: The European Fairy-Tale Tradition between Orality and Literacy

Introduction: The European Fairy-Tale Tradition between Orality and Literacy Dan Ben-Amos (bio) In fairy godfather: straparola, venice, and the fairy tale tradition, Ruth Bottigheimer proposes to correct the historical narrative of the emergence of the fairy tale in Europe and to recognize “Straparola’s role as an originator in the history of modern fairy tale” (Bottigheimer 2002:3). Giovanni Francesco Straparola (c. 1480–c. 1557) is not exactly an unknown figure in folktale history.1 His book, Le piacevoli notti (Pleasant nights), which appeared in English as The Nights of Straparola (Straparola [1551–1553] 1894), was long recognized as a predecessor of Giambattista Basile’s Lo cunto de li cunti (The tale of tales; published 1634–1636; also known in its 1674 edition as Il Pentamerone) and Charles Perrault’s Contes de ma mere l’Oye (Tales of Mother Goose; Perrault [1695–1697] 1956). As Bottigheimer (2002:2) points out, the Grimm brothers considered Straparola as their precursor, admiring him as an author who conscientiously drew upon oral tradition. Selections from Straparola’s tales appeared in volumes published in Vienna in 1791, which included twenty-four tales, and in Berlin in 1817, which included eighteen tales and was accompanied by the copious notes of the editor and translator Friedrich Wilhelm Valentine Schmidt. In the mid-nineteenth century, Theodor Benfey found in the case of Straparola implicit support for his theory of the Indian origin of folktales. For him, the availability of Straparola’s tales was felicitous evidence for the possible historical interdependence of oral and literate tales. Since the idea that oral tradition alone could sustain a global diffusion of tales was unfathomable in his days, he relied on the migration and translation of the Panchatantra, a classic Indian tale collection, as a support for his Indian origin hypothesis (Benfey 1859). The availability of a European tale collection that demonstrated the possibility of such historical interdependence provided him with further support for his theory. In her book, Bottigheimer rekindles Benfey’s conception of literature as inspiration for oral storytelling, and she proceeds to attribute to Straparola a far greater role in the history of the folktale. She argues that he was not merely a link in the back-andforth transitions between oral storytelling and literature but was an original literary innovator who created a new, previously unknown folktale form—the “rise tale.” Associated with this form, and thematically central to it, is the narrative role of a magical benefactor in human or animal guise; Bottigheimer considers this narrative figure to be Straparola’s literary invention as well. In her view, Straparola acted as an [End Page 373] agent of a newly rising urban middle class and expressed in his “rise tales” its socioeconomic aspirations. While the consideration of folktales as a reflection of social and cultural values has been a staple of folklore research, the proposition that a literary writer originated a folklore form, and created a new narrative role to go along with this form, is revolutionary for the field. Such a clear, precise, and well-defined proposition, which is limited to a specific literary-historical case, could be tested like a scientific hypothesis. Karl Popper proposed that a scientific system “require[s] that its logical form shall be such that it can be singled out, by means of empirical tests, in a negative sense: it must be possible for an empirical scientific system to be refuted by experience” (1959:41). Although Bottigheimer formulates her hypothesis in descriptive rather than logical terms, in her challenging study she offers a rare opportunity for testing a proposition that concerns a critical period in the history of the folktale: the era of the print revolution (see Baron, Lindquist, and Shevlin 2007; Eisenstein 1979, 1983). This was a period in which chapbooks, pamphlets, broadsides, and other forms of popular printing entered the domains of the marketplace, the family room, and the coffeehouse, as well as the community hall and bar, where oral entertainment previously ruled. Regarding the European folktale tradition, print also changed the rules of historical evidence and entrapped folktales in a historical paradox. Chronologically, many literary tales pre-date the recordings of their oral counterparts. In fact, it is...