paper 0-415-92151-1 Zipes (German/Univ. of Minnesota; Don—t Bet on the Prince, 1986, etc.), a children’s literature specialist, here gathers together his introductions and postscripts from various previous fairy tale collections. The result is a concise yet comprehensive picture of the genre’s development in Western Europe and America since the 1600s. Fairy tales thrived as an oral tradition for centuries before they were transcribed. Zipes argues that early tales didn—t target a juvenile audience; instead, their allegorical form often concealed social, moral, ethical, and aesthetic criticism appreciated only by adults. The pioneer of the genre in France was Charles Perrault, who created fairy tales drawing on pagan beliefs and folklore, rather than on antique sources, as the classicist canon of his time preferred. In Germany, Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm charged their tales with Protestant ethics, while Hans Christian Andersen negotiated power relations and social domination in Danish society. Due to religious austerity, fairy tales were suppressed in England until the middle of the 19th century. After they entered literature officially during the Victorian Age, they exhibited a strong didactic tendency, and eventually took shape as an implicit critical inquiry into the dominant materialist culture, the oppressive moral code, or, as in the case of Oscar Wilde, normative sexuality. Among American fairy tale writers, Zipes focuses particularly on Frank Baum, whose multivolume work on the utopian land of Oz became a fixture of the cultural landscape, embodying the author’s dream of a socialist alternative to American capitalism. Zipes skillfully weaves into his narrative the story of the influence of the Arabian Nights, translations of which began to appear in the West as early as the 1700s. At the close of his study, he also looks briefly at how the 20th-century German novelist Hermann Hesse infused the classical fairy tale with the macabre and romantic realism to reflect his personal journey and European political conflicts. An enticing reexamination of cherished texts. (15 illustrations) (Author tour)
Pub Date: Feb. 1, 1999
ISBN: 0-415-92150-3
Page Count: 240
Publisher: Routledge
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 1998
BOOK REVIEW
From the national correspondent for PBS's MacNeil-Lehrer Newshour: a moving memoir of her youth in the Deep South and her role in desegregating the Univ. of Georgia. The eldest daughter of an army chaplain, Hunter-Gault was born in what she calls the ``first of many places that I would call `my place' ''—the small village of Due West, tucked away in a remote little corner of South Carolina. While her father served in Korea, Hunter-Gault and her mother moved first to Covington, Georgia, and then to Atlanta. In ``L.A.'' (lovely Atlanta), surrounded by her loving family and a close-knit black community, the author enjoyed a happy childhood participating in activities at church and at school, where her intellectual and leadership abilities soon were noticed by both faculty and peers. In high school, Hunter-Gault found herself studying the ``comic-strip character Brenda Starr as I might have studied a journalism textbook, had there been one.'' Determined to be a journalist, she applied to several colleges—all outside of Georgia, for ``to discourage the possibility that a black student would even think of applying to one of those white schools, the state provided money for black students'' to study out of state. Accepted at Michigan's Wayne State, the author was encouraged by local civil-rights leaders to apply, along with another classmate, to the Univ. of Georgia as well. Her application became a test of changing racial attitudes, as well as of the growing strength of the civil-rights movement in the South, and Gault became a national figure as she braved an onslaught of hostilities and harassment to become the first black woman to attend the university. A remarkably generous, fair-minded account of overcoming some of the biggest, and most intractable, obstacles ever deployed by southern racists. (Photographs—not seen.)
Pub Date: Nov. 1, 1992
ISBN: 0-374-17563-2
Page Count: 192
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 1992
Necessarily swift and adumbrative as well as inclusive, focused, and graceful.
A light-speed tour of (mostly) Western poetry, from the 4,000-year-old Gilgamesh to the work of Australian poet Les Murray, who died in 2019.
In the latest entry in the publisher’s Little Histories series, Carey, an emeritus professor at Oxford whose books include What Good Are the Arts? and The Unexpected Professor: An Oxford Life in Books, offers a quick definition of poetry—“relates to language as music relates to noise. It is language made special”—before diving in to poetry’s vast history. In most chapters, the author deals with only a few writers, but as the narrative progresses, he finds himself forced to deal with far more than a handful. In his chapter on 20th-century political poets, for example, he talks about 14 writers in seven pages. Carey displays a determination to inform us about who the best poets were—and what their best poems were. The word “greatest” appears continually; Chaucer was “the greatest medieval English poet,” and Langston Hughes was “the greatest male poet” of the Harlem Renaissance. For readers who need a refresher—or suggestions for the nightstand—Carey provides the best-known names and the most celebrated poems, including Paradise Lost (about which the author has written extensively), “Kubla Khan,” “Ozymandias,” “The Charge of the Light Brigade,” Wordsworth and Coleridge’s Lyrical Ballads, which “changed the course of English poetry.” Carey explains some poetic technique (Hopkins’ “sprung rhythm”) and pauses occasionally to provide autobiographical tidbits—e.g., John Masefield, who wrote the famous “Sea Fever,” “hated the sea.” We learn, as well, about the sexuality of some poets (Auden was bisexual), and, especially later on, Carey discusses the demons that drove some of them, Robert Lowell and Sylvia Plath among them. Refreshingly, he includes many women in the volume—all the way back to Sappho—and has especially kind words for Marianne Moore and Elizabeth Bishop, who share a chapter.
Necessarily swift and adumbrative as well as inclusive, focused, and graceful.Pub Date: April 21, 2020
ISBN: 978-0-300-23222-6
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Yale Univ.
Review Posted Online: Feb. 8, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2020
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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