Wonders and Marvels: History of the Fairy Tale Week

I've had a post about Wonders and Marvels in the preliminary stages for several weeks and this is the perfect time since next week the site is focusing specifically on fairy tales.

Here's a press release: “The History of the Fairy Tale” Week Begins December 13 on Wonders and Marvels.

All are invited to a weeklong celebration of the meaning and mystery of fairy tales.

Come hither into the marvelous, mysterious, complex and fascinating world of fairy tales for grown-ups at the Wonders and Marvels website all week beginning December 13. The History of the Fairy Tale week will feature guest blog posts, book giveaways, profiles of the earliest fairy tale writers, and much more.

“Fairy tales weren’t initially written for children. The earliest tales are full of sex, desire, and violence. Hardly the stuff of sweet dreams,” says cultural historian Holly Tucker, who curates Wonders and Marvels.

Among the guest posts from university professors and specialists of the fairy tale will be “5 Fairy Tales about Fairy Tales,” “5 of the Best Tales You’ve Never Read,” and “5 Reasons Why I Would Not Read These Fairy Tales to My Child.”

All week long, readers will be eligible to win copies of fairy tale collections such as The Complete Tales of Charles Perrault (Oxford University Press.) [Read SurLaLune's post about the book here.]

Those who wrote the earliest fairy tales were many times as colorful as their tales. Readers will be treated to the profiles of such fairy tale authors as Giovanni Francesco Straparola, Giambattista Basile, Madame d’Aulnoy, Charles Perrault, and Madame de Beaumont (author of “Beauty and the Beast.”)

Holly Tucker, a fellow Nashvillian who teaches at Vanderbilt (we've never met!), is the curator of Wonders and Marvels, a site that offers short articles about odd bits of history and other curiosities. The site doesn't discuss fairy tales in particular very often, but a few articles, especially about Little Red Riding Hood have appeared there before. She is also the author of Pregnant Fictions: Childbirth and the Fairy Tale in Early-Modern France. I recently posted about Tucker in In WSJ: Academic Studies of Fairy Tales.


Wonders and Marvels is offering the special fairy tale week in conjunction with the release of Disney's Princess and the Frog. The SurLaLune Blog will also offer a week of Frog Prince features--most of them not about the Disney movie--in conjunction with the film's release.