Library Essentials Month: A Companion to the Fairy Tale edited by Hilda Ellis Davidson and Anna Chaudhri

A Companion to the Fairy Tale edited by Hilda Ellis Davidson and Anna Chaudhri. This is another favorite of mine. I have benefited from many of the articles found within but my favorite is "Unknown Cinderella: The Contribution of Marian Roalfe Cox to the Study of Fairy Tale." Overall, an interesting collection of essays about fairy tales, better than other collections of similar ilk actually. A lot of the essentials of fairy tale scholarship are addressed within with an interesting diversity that doesn't feel like it is overreaching itself. In other words, I like this one and recommend it. See the table of contents below to get a feel for it...

Book description from the publisher:

Introduction by Derek Brewer. This book discusses the characteristics of the traditional fairy tale in Europe and North America, and various theories of its development and interpretation. The book deals with the main collections - the Grimm brothers, Hans Andersen, Perrault and Afanes'ev - and with the development of tales in various regions of Europe, including Ireland, Wales, Scandinavia, Germany and Russia, as well as India, where it was once claimed that they originated. The subject of the fairy tale is a controversial one: problems discussed here include the relationship between tales recorded from story-tellers and literary works, the importance of printed works for the spread of the tales, the growth of recent examples with a feminine approach, the spread of popular tales like Cinderella, special types like the cumulative tales, possible effects of TV, and the nature of traditional plots and characters. Above all, the collection is concerned with the distribution and long survival of these tales, and the nature of their appeal.

SHORTLISTED FOR THE KATHARINE BRIGGS FOLKLORE AWARD 2004.

Contributors: GRAHAM ANDERSON, DAVID BLAMIRES, RUTH BOTTIGHEIMER, DEREK BREWER, MARY BROCKINGTON, ANNA CHAUDHRI, HILDA ELLIS DAVIDSON, ROBIN GWYNDAF, BENGT HOLBEK, DAVID HUNT, REIMUND KVIDELAND, PATRICIA LYSAGHT, NEIL PHILIP, JAMES RIORDAN, PAT SCHAEFER, TOM SHIPPEY, JOYCE THOMAS.

Table of Contents:

Abbreviations
Introduction
The Interpretation of Fairy Tales
Creativity and Tradition in the Fairy Tale
The Ultimate Fairy Tale: Oral Transmission in a Literate World
A Workshop of Editorial Practice: The Grimms' Kinder- und Hausmarchen
Old Tales for New: Finding the First Fairy Tales
Helpers and Adversaries in Fairy Tales
'Catch if you can': The Cumulative Tale
Unknown Cinderella: The Contribution of Marian Roalfe Cox to the Study of Fairy Tale
Hans Christian Andersen's Use of Folktales
The Collecting and Study of Tales in Scandinavia
The Wonder Tale in Ireland
Welsh Folk Narrative and the Fairy Tale
The Ossetic Oral Narrative Tradition: Fairy Tales in the Context of Other Forms of Traditional Literature
Russian Fairy Tales and Their Collectors
Fairy-Tale Motifs from the Caucasus
The Fairy Tale in South Asia: The Same Only Different
Rewriting the Core: Transformations of the Fairy Tale in Contemporary Writing
General Index
Index of main tales and tale-types