Mother Goose Refigured

Mother Goose Refigured
Author: Christine A. Jones
Publisher: Wayne State University Press
Total Pages: 206
Release: 2016-11-07
Genre: Fiction
ISBN: 0814338933

Mother Goose Refigured presents annotated translations of Charles Perrault’s 1697 fairy tales that attend to the irony and ambiguity in the original French and provide a fresh take on heroines and heroes that have become household names in North America. Charles Perrault published Histoires ou Contes du temps passé ("Stories or Tales of the Past") in France in 1697 during what scholars call the first "vogue" of tales produced by learned French writers. The genre that we now know so well was new and an uncommon kind of literature in the epic world of Louis XIV's court. This inaugural collection of French fairy tales features characters like Sleeping Beauty, Cinderella, and Puss in Boots that over the course of the eighteenth century became icons of social history in France and abroad. Translating the original Histoires ou Contes means grappling not only with the strangeness of seventeenth-century French but also with the ubiquity and familiarity of plots and heroines in their famous English personae. From its very first translation in 1729, Histoires ou Contes has depended heavily on its English translations for the genesis of character names and enduring recognition. This dependability makes new, innovative translation challenging. For example, can Perrault's invented name "Cendrillon" be retranslated into anything other than "Cinderella"? And what would happen to our understanding of the tale if it were? Is it possible to sidestep the Anglophone tradition and view the seventeenth-century French anew? Why not leave Cinderella alone, as she is deeply ingrained in cultural lore and beloved the way she is? Such questions inspired the translations of these tales in Mother Goose Refigured, which aim to generate new critical interest in heroines and heroes that seem frozen in time. The book offers introductory essays on the history of interpretation and translation, before retranslating each of the Histoires ou Conteswith the aim to prove that if Perrault's is a classical frame of reference, these tales nonetheless exhibit strikingly modern strategies. Designed for scholars, their classrooms, and other adult readers of fairy tales, Mother Goose Refigured promises to inspire new academic interpretations of the Mother Goose tales, particularly among readers who do not have access to the original French and have relied for their critical inquiries on traditional renderings of the tales.

Eight Children in Narnia

Eight Children in Narnia
Author: Jared Lodbell
Publisher: Open Court
Total Pages: 241
Release: 2016-10-04
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 0812699106

Eight Children in Narnia is a detailed study of C.S. Lewis’s Chronicles of Narnia, exploring the story’s influences, themes, symbols, ironies—and the reasons for its enormous popular success. Lobdell draws attention to insistent motifs in the work: the great house in the country, the past alive in the present, the life of the imagination, the mixture of the familiar and the adventurously new, the combination of pageant and satire, the child as judge, and the child as warrior. A prolific writer and literary scholar with an established reputation, Lewis decided quite late in life to write something completely new to him: a story for children, and he drew upon his own childhood memories as well as his literary and philosophical theories. Among the many important influences Lobdell identifies Bunyan, Swift, Kipling, and the popular children’s writer E. Nesbit, as well as the classic fairy-tale and medieval romance.

Seven Demon Stories from Medieval Japan

Seven Demon Stories from Medieval Japan
Author: Noriko T. Reider
Publisher: University Press of Colorado
Total Pages: 307
Release: 2016-10-03
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 1607324903

In Japanese culture, oni are ubiquitous supernatural creatures who play important roles in literature, lore, and folk belief. Characteristically ambiguous, they have been great and small, mischievous and dangerous, and ugly and beautiful over their long history. Here, author Noriko Reider presents seven oni stories from medieval Japan in full and translated for an English-speaking audience. Reider, concordant with many scholars of Japanese cultural studies, argues that to study oni is to study humanity. These tales are from an era in which many new oni stories appeared for the purpose of both entertainment and moral/religious edification and for which oni were particularly important, as they were perceived to be living entities. They reflect not only the worldview of medieval Japan but also themes that inform twenty-first-century Japanese pop and vernacular culture, including literature, manga, film, and anime. With each translation, Reider includes an introductory essay exploring the historical and cultural importance of the characters and oni manifestations within this period. Offering new insights into and interpretations of not only the stories therein but also the entire genre of Japanese ghost stories, Seven Demon Stories is a valuable companion to Reider’s 2010 volume Japanese Demon Lore. It will be of significant value to folklore scholars as well as students of Japanese culture.

Reading Smell in Eighteenth-Century Fiction

Reading Smell in Eighteenth-Century Fiction
Author: Emily C. Friedman
Publisher: Bucknell University Press
Total Pages: 209
Release: 2016-06-27
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 1611487536

Scent is both an essential and seemingly impossible-to-recover aspect of material culture. Scent is one of our strongest ties to memory, yet to remember a smell without external stimuli is almost impossible for most people. Moreover, human beings’ (specifically Western humans) ability to smell has been diminished through a process of increased emphasis on odor-removal, hygienic practices that emphasize de-odorization (rather than the covering of one odor by another).While other intangibles of the human experience have been placed into the context of the eighteenth-century novel, scent has so far remained largely sidelined in favor of discussions of the visual, the aural, touch, and taste. The past decade has seen a great expansion of our understanding of how smell works physiologically, psychologically, and culturally, and there is no better moment than now to attempt to recover the traces of olfactory perceptions, descriptions, and assumptions. Reading Smell provides models for how to incorporate olfactory knowledge into new readings of the literary form central to our understanding of the eighteenth century and modernity in general: the novel. The multiplication and development of the novel overlaps strikingly with changes in personal and private hygienic practices that would alter the culture’s relationship to smell. This book examines how far the novel can be understood through a reintroduction of olfactory information. After decades of reading for all kinds of racial, cultural, gendered, and other sorts of absences back into the novel, this book takes one step further: to consider how the recovery of forgotten or overlooked olfactory assumptions might reshape our understanding of these texts. Reading Smell includes wide-scale research and focused case studies of some of the most striking or prevalent uses of olfactory language in eighteenth-century British prose fiction. Highlighting scents with shifting meanings across the period: bodies, tobacco, smelling-bottles, and sulfur, Reading Smell not only provides new insights into canonical works by authors like Swift, Smollett, Richardson, Burney, Austen, and Lewis, but also sheds new light on the history of the British novel as a whole.

The Book of Greek and Roman Folktales, Legends, and Myths

The Book of Greek and Roman Folktales, Legends, and Myths
Author: William Hansen
Publisher: Princeton University Press
Total Pages: 579
Release: 2019-10-29
Genre: History
ISBN: 0691195927

The first anthology to present the entire range of ancient Greek and Roman stories- from myths and fairy tales to jokes Captured centaurs and satyrs, talking animals, people who suddenly change sex, men who give birth, the temporarily insane and the permanently thick-witted, delicate sensualists, incompetent seers, a woman who remembers too much, a man who cannot laugh-these are just some of the colorful characters who feature in the unforgettable stories that ancient Greeks and Romans told in their daily lives. Together they created an incredibly rich body of popular oral stories that include, but range well beyond, mythology-from heroic legends, fairy tales, and fables to ghost stories, urban legends, and jokes.

Let's Read

Let's Read
Author: Cynthia A. Barnhart
Publisher: Wayne State University Press
Total Pages: 516
Release: 2010
Genre: Education
ISBN: 9780814334553

Originally published in 1961, Let's Read is a simple and systematic way to teach basic reading. Developed by noted linguist Leonard Bloomfield, the book is based on the alphabetic spelling patterns of English. Bloomfield offered an antidote to the idea that English is a difficult language to learn to read by teaching the learner to decode the phonemic sound-letter correlations of the language in a sequential, logical progression of lessons based on its spelling patterns. The learner is first introduced to the most consistent (alphabetic) vocabulary and then to increasingly less alphabetic and less frequent spelling patterns within a vocabulary of about 5,000 words. The second edition of Let's Read brings Bloomfield's innovative program into the twenty-first century without changing the sequence of exercises but with revised text and an attractive new design and layout.

Mother Goose

Mother Goose
Author: Eulalie Osgood Grover
Publisher:
Total Pages: 136
Release: 1915
Genre: Animals
ISBN:

A collection of 108 illustrated Mother Goose rhymes.

Perrault's Fairy Tales

Perrault's Fairy Tales
Author: Charles Perrault
Publisher: Courier Corporation
Total Pages: 130
Release: 2012-03-15
Genre: Juvenile Fiction
ISBN: 0486117588

Here are the original eight stories from the 1697 volume Contes de temps passé by the great Charles Perrault: "Cinderella," "Sleeping Beauty," "Puss in Boots," and more. Also includes 34 extraordinary full-page engravings by Gustave Doré.

Poetry's Playground

Poetry's Playground
Author: Joseph T. Thomas
Publisher: Wayne State University Press
Total Pages: 204
Release: 2007
Genre: Juvenile Nonfiction
ISBN: 9780814332962

While the study of children's poetry has always had a place in the realm of children's literature, scholars have not typically considered it in relation to the larger scope of contemporary poetry. In this volume, Joseph T. Thomas, Jr., explores the "playground" of children's poetry within the world of contemporary adult poetic discourse, bringing the complex social relations of play and games, cliques and fashions, and drama and humor in children's poetry to light for the first time. Poetry's Playground considers children's poetry published in the United States from the mid-twentieth century onward, a time when many established adult poets began writing for young audiences. Through the work of major figures like Robert Frost, Gwendolyn Brooks, Carl Sandburg, Randall Jarrell, Theodore Roethke, Shel Silverstein, and Jack Prelutsky, Thomas explores children's poems within the critical and historical conversations surrounding adult texts, arguing at the same time that children's poetry is an oft-neglected but crucial part of the American poetic tradition. Canonical issues are central to Poetry's Playground. The volume begins by tracing Robert Frost's emergence as the United States' official school poet, exploring the political and aesthetic dimensions of his canonization and considering which other poets were pushed aside as a result. The study also includes a look at eight major anthologies of children's poems in the United States, offering a descriptive canon that will be invaluable to future scholarship. Additionally, Poetry's Playground addresses poetry actually written and performed by children, exploring the connections between folk poetry produced both on playgrounds and in the classroom. Poetry's Playground is a groundbreaking study that makes bold connections between children's and adult poetry. This book will be of interest to poets, scholars of poetry and children's literature, as well as students and teachers of literary history, cultural anthropology, and contemporary poetry.