In one of the most stratling literary discoveries of recent years, Jack Zipes has uncovered this neglected treasuretrove of Sicilian folk and fairy tales. Like the Grimm brothers before her, Laura Gonzenbach, a talented Swiss-German born in Sicily, set out to gether up the tales told and retold among the peasants. Gonzenbach collected wonderful stories, some on subjects that readers will know from the Grimms or Perrault, some entirely new, and published them in German. her early death and the destruction of her papers in the Messina earthquake of 1908 only add to the mystery behind her achievement. The Robber with the Witch's Head is an instant classic: a ninteenth century collection of stories in the great tradition of fairy and folk tales now translated into English for the first time. Gonzenbach delights us woth heroines and princes, socery and surprise, the deeds of the brave and the treacherous, and the magic of the true storyteller. Yet while the stories enchant us, the wry taglines with which they often end ('And so they remainedrich and consoled, while we keep sitting here and are getting old') gently bring us back to earth. The Robber with the Witch's Head M is the rcihest of gifts, a genuine literary surprise.

The Robber with the Witch's Head

Jack Zipes

Routledge

Fairy Tales & Fables from Weimar Days

Books on Demand

This catalog explores the psychological and social implications contained in the hybrid creatures and fantastic scenarios created by contemporary artists whose works will appear in the exhibition Fairy Tales, Monsters, and the Genetic Imagination, which opens at Nashville's Frist Center for the Visual Arts in February 2012. Curator Mark Scala's introductory essay focuses on anthropomorphism in the mythology, folklore, and art of many cultures as it contrasts with the dominant Western view of human exceptionalism. Scala also provides an art historical context, linking the visual fabulists of today to artists of the Romantic, Symbolist, and Surrealist periods who sought to transcend oppositions such as rationality and intuition, fear and desire, the physical and the spiritual. 
Discussing how artists adapt traditional stories to give mythic form to the very real dilemmas of contemporary life, Jack Zipes's "Fairy-Tale Collisions" centers on Paula Rego, Kiki Smith, and Cindy Sherman. From a generation of women who have attained prominence since the 1980s, these artists alter fairy-tale imagery to subvert or rewrite social roles and codes. 
In "Metamorphosis of the Monstrous," Marina Warner discusses works in the exhibition in the context of historical conceptions of monsters as expressions of alterity, bestiality, or sinfulness. Her reminder that contemporary monster images offer "a promise and a warning about the variety, heterogeneity, and possible combinations and recombinations in the order of things" sets the stage for Suzanne Anker's essay, punningly titled "The Extant Vamp (or the) Ire of It All: Fairy Tales and Genetic Engineering." Considering representations of hybrid bodies by Patricia Piccinini, Janaina Tschape, Saya Woolfalk, and others, which evoke imagined beings of the past as a way to envision the recombinant creatures that may lie in the future, Anker shows how artists explore the social, ethical, and future implications of biological design and enhanced evolution. 
Accompanying an exhibition of contemporary art in which depictions of marvelous creatures and fantastic narratives provide both chills and delights, the essays in Fairy Tales, Monsters, and the Genetic Imagination explore the meaning of this fabulist revival through the lenses of social and art history, literature, feminism, animal studies, and science.

Fairy Tales, Monsters, and the Genetic Imagination (Frist Art Museum Title)

MARINA WARNER

Suzanne Anker

Mark W. Scala

Arts & Photography

Vanderbilt University Press

Fairy-Tale Films Beyond Disney: International Perspectives

Sticks and Stones: The Troublesome Success of Children's Literature from Slovenly Peter to Harry Potter

Happily Ever After: Fairy Tales, Children, and the Culture Industry

When Dreams Came True: Classical Fairy Tales and Their Tradition

The Collected Sicilian Folk and Fairy Tales of Giuseppe Pitré

Taylor&Francis

Creative Storytelling

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Books by Jack Zipes