Contents of
Vol. 23, No. 2 (2009)

Editorial Policy  
Guidelines for Submission   

ARTICLES
What Happened to the Heroines in Folktales: An Analysis by Gender of a Multicultural Sample of Published Folktales Collected from Storytellers
Kathleen Ragan
Using grammatically defined units and a random selection of 1,601 folktales, this paper analyzes the gender of protagonists of published folktales as related to the gender of editors, collectors and storytellers. The differential representation of female folktales is statistically quantified. Independently reproducible results uphold mainstream feminist objections to supposedly impartial analyses of folk and fairy tales and indicate that structuralist analyses which have not taken gender into account in the compilation of their data sets, can be considered compromised. This paper demonstrates what mainstream feminists consider obvious but mainstream scholars in some other fields consider unproven assumption.

Devils, Demons, Familiars, Friends: Towards a Semiotics of Literary Cats
Maria Nikolajeva
The essay traces the portrayal of cats in folklore and literature from Ancient Egypt to the present. Cats have always been popular nonhuman characters in all kinds of stories, and their attraction must be ascribed to their enigmatic nature, reflected in the various beliefs and prejudices. Cats are portrayed in a vast spectrum of roles, from nature stories, where they are endowed with minimal human intellect and emotions to fully anthropomorphized figures. A subtle balance of these two polarities produces the most fascinating results. While many folktales and stories feature cats as ingenious helpers to protagonists, a few contemporary authors have employed cats as complex human characters in disguise.

Functions of Textile and Sartorial Artifacts in Russian Folktales
Victoria Ivleva
This article studies the main functions of textile and vestimentary artifacts in a three-volume edition of Russian folktales collected by Aleksandr Afanas’ev. The author explores the revealing, concealing, transformational, aesthetic, utilitarian and metaphorical roles of attire. Special attention is given to historical, social and gender-related issues in pre-Petrine and post-Petrine Russian culture that may have had an impact on the representations of raiment and vestimentary motifs in the tales. Occasional references to similar motifs and images in Western folklore are provided.

Luigi Capuana: Unlikely Spinner of Fairy Tales?
Gina M. Miele
This paper considers how the realistic traces of life in a small Sicilian town and the principles of verismo (provincial elements, impersonal style, use of dialect, regionalism, and political commentary) are present, although under the guise of magic, in Luigi Capuana’s stories of wonder and enchantment. I read provincial culture, regional pride, and national spirit in Capuana’s literary fiabe, and contend that they do not represent a departure from verismo, as some critics would have it. At the same time, Capuana’s narratives, filled with folkloric motifs, character types, and plots, as well as echoes of the oral tradition in the frequent address of audience by the storyteller, are rooted in the genre of fairy tales. Over seventy-three fiabe and more than twenty years, Capuana explored various functions of storytelling from diversion to political commentary and moral instruction.

Tangled Up in Blue: Liz Lochhead’s Grimm Sisters Tales
Tudor Balinisteanu
The essay focuses on Lochhead’s retelling of memorable and notable fairy-tale motifs, conventions and topoi, in which she challenges the ways in which traditional folk tales (and more generally, cultural memory and legend) have been used to construct women’s social experiences. The poems create an awareness of stories as tools for challenging the sense of social interrelationships established in masculine gender regimes, revisiting the legitimacy of the social goals these regimes enshrine. Lochhead’s storyteller reconstructs the realms of fantasy wherein identity is forged, proposing disjunctive stories that rematerialize an empowering women’s identity.

Adaptations of Folktales and Motifs in Madame d’Aulnoy's Contes: A Brief Survey of Influence and Diffusion
Jacques Barchilon
Nearly all the stories by Marie-Catherine d’Aulnoy (1650-1705) contain identifiable tale types. This is clear upon examining her tales in conjunction with seminal works of classification such as Stith Thompson’s Motif-Index of Folk-Literature, Delarue-Tenèze’s Conte populaire français, and Hans-Jörg Uther’s Types of International Folktales. The significant presence of tale types in d’Aulnoy’s oeuvre, of which this article offers a brief survey, argues well for the universality of her appeal.

TEXTS & TRANSLATIONS
Luigi Capuana’s Search for the New Fairy Tale
Jack Zipes
Complementing Gina M. Miele’s article on Luigi Capuana in this issue of Marvels & Tales, this contribution offers an English translation of five tales by the Italian writer, who wanted to recapture the essence of the old, authentic fairy tale and create new stories that were less didactic and less frivolous than the ones generally being published for children in Italy at the end of the nineteenth century. Three tales focus on the figure of the storyteller, and two tales serve as interesting examples of Capuana’s great capacity to embrace traditional Sicilian folklore and to reinvigorate traditional types and motifs in his terse, succinct, and ironic style.

Eliseo Diego and Fairy Tales
Mark Weiss
Eliseo Diego (1920-1994), one of Cuba’s and Latin America’s most celebrated poets and short story writers, had a lifelong interest in fairy tales, as a reader, and professionally, as a translator and as Director of the Department of Children’s Literature of the National Library of Cuba. His essays on the folktale stress their importance in education, their poetry, and their relation to time. Translations of two of his poems are included. The first, “The Girl in the Forest,” retells “Little Red Riding Hood” from the point of view of the wolf. It becomes a story of impossible longing. The second, “Mother Goose,” portrays her very differently than we’re used to, as an old peasant woman in a dark hovel who has the power to summon for her listeners the moment of creation.

Reviews  
An Anthology of American Folktales and Legends (Ed. Frank de Caro)     
Heather Diamond

The Collected Sicilian Folk and Fairy Tales of Giuseppe Pitrè (Ed. and trans. Jack Zipes and Joseph Russo)       
Francisco Vaz da Silva

Raja Nal and the Goddess: The North Indian Epic Dhola in Performance (Susan Snow Wadley)     
Sadhana Naithani

Ramayana Stories in Modern South India: An Anthology (Ed. Paula Richman)        
S. Shankar

The Golden Thread: Storytelling in Teaching and Learning (Susan Danoff)     
Victoria G. Dworkin

Suddenly They Heard Footsteps: Storytelling for the Twenty-First Century. (Dan Yashinsky)        
Kay Stone

Brothers & Beasts: An Anthology of Men of Fairy Tales (Ed. Kate Bernheimer. Foreword Maria Tatar. Afterword Jack Zipes)      
Margaret R. Yocom

Some Day Your Witch Will Come (Kay Stone)      
Jeana Jorgensen

Elusive Childhood: Impossible Representations in Modern Fiction (Susan Honeyman)    
Julie Anastasia Barton

Adventures into Otherness: Child Metamorphs in Late Twentieth-century Children’s Literature (Maria Lassén-Seger)     
Carmen Nolte

Fairy-Tale Science: Monstrous Generation in the Tales of Straparola and Basile (Suzanne Magnanini)       
Stephanie Hom Cary

The Victorian Press and the Fairy Tale (Caroline Sumpter)    
Laurence Talairach-Vielmas

Seductions in Narrative: Subjectivity and Desire in the Works of Angela Carter and Jeanette Winterson (Gemma López)    
Jennifer Orme

Contemporary Fiction and the Fairy Tale (Ed. Stephen Benson)      
Armelle Parey

The Enchantress of Florence (Salman Rushdie)
JoAnn Conrad