Fairy Tales focuses on how artists, designers and filmmakers have taken inspiration from fantasy motifs, adapting the fairy tale vocabulary of extremes to their own artistic needs.
Lila, played by Ludovica Nasti (right) in the HBO production of Elena Ferrante’s My Beautiful Friend.
Eduardo Castaldo/HBO
Half-wild Lyra from Northern Lights was the first female character who felt real to Jane Gleeson-White. Then she met Elena Ferrante’s ‘ferocious, filthy, quicksilver’ Lila, a more complex version.
Like all members of the category of ‘fey’, or the beings of the preternatural world, including fairies, elves, and pixies, goblins are renowned for being tricksy. In other words, best avoided.
A bear eats a teenager, and inherits his memories. An ageing woman writer buys a tower of her own – where she reimagines the crone from Rapunzel. Two inventive new books resonate with our reviewer.
A prince flies in a carriage propelled by kingfishers in Hume Cook’s Australian Fairytales.
Author provided
From mythical Moth people, who kidnapped children, to threatening desert fairies in loincloths, early Australian fairy tales helped sanitise white settlement, expressing colonial fears.
A Ukrainian soldier wanders down a railway past the bodies of dead Russian soldiers on the outskirts of Irpin, Ukraine, March 1, 2022.
Marcus Yam/Los Angeles Times via Getty Images
The Russian army has fared poorly and the Ukrainian military has fared well, defying experts’ predictions about the war in Ukraine. Can children’s fairy tales help explain the difference?
Today’s stories embrace the monster — and explain how she was created.
Riffing on several fairy tales and littered with pop culture references, Shrek positioned itself as animation’s dirty alternative to Disney classics.
Pictorial Press Ltd/Alamy
During this unsettling time, global leaders have assured children and adults alike that the tooth fairy, free from the risk of infection, is indeed an essential worker.
Why grown-ups still need fairy tales
The Conversation, CC BY22,8 MB(download)
We consciously and unconsciously tell fairy tales today, despite advances in logic and science. It’s as if there is something ingrained in us that compels us to see the world through this lens.
BBC’s Call the Midwife is a celebration of working class women’s labour. In its frank, but sweet, discussion of childbirth, it has much in common with fairy tales.
Fairytales are increasingly being targeted for giving girls inappropriate messages. But these stories have always evolved with the times, and talk of banning them is misguided.
Edmund Dulac’s 1910 illustration of Sleeping Beauty.
Wikimedia images
Fairy tales can be brutal, violent, sexual and laden with taboo. But they are are excellent narratives with which to think through a range of human experiences: from disappointment, and fear to envy and grief.
Children’s books were historically moralising and instructive. What’s changed?
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Children’s literature may be a modern genre, but there is a long history of writing for children with some surprisingly unchanging elements.
In the Fir Tree, children stamp on a discarded – but feeling – Christmas tree.
The Fir Tree, illustrated by George Dalziel and Edward Dalziel, from Out of the Heart: Spoken to the Little Ones, 1867
The Industrial Revolution choked English cities in smog, filled rivers with waste and spread disease in crowded cities. At the same time, fairy tales about humans destroying nature proliferated.