Disney’s new Black mermaid has been called ‘inauthentic’ – but fairy tales have always been repurposed across cultures. And Hans Christian Andersen’s Little Mermaid was different from Disney’s.
An engraving by Gustave Doré of the famous ball scene in Charles Perrault’s Cinderella.
Prisma Archivo/Alamy
Cinderella has been taken further and further away from its origins that we forget it was originally a radical story about female desire, servitude and violence.
Despite little formal education, Hogg wrote one of the finest novels in Scottish literature, a disturbing tale of the divided self that still resonates.
The glass slippers in Disney’s 2015 film version of Cinderella.
Allison Shearmur Productions, Beagle Pug Films, Genre Films
There is nothing new about a shoe fetish. Fairy tales have long featured amazing, high-tech footwear: from seven-league boots to glass slippers to red shoes.
Fairy tales are extremely moral in their demarcation between good and evil, right and wrong.
Marcella Cheng/The Conversation NY-BD-CC
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.
Children’s books were historically moralising and instructive. What’s changed?
Hillarie/Flickr
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.
Nell Greenwood, Australian Film, Television and Radio School
Female sexuality is a powerful, enchanting force in narratives ranging from fairytales to a modern Turkish film. Mustang reminds us that sometimes education can be an alternative to death or marriage.
Johnny Depp and Amber Heard arrive at Southport Magistrates Court in Australia, 18 April 2016.
EPA/AAP
Do you run wild in Fallout, or vicariously hunt zombies in The Walking Dead? Three philosophers investigate the enduring appeal of the post-apocalypse.
The probability of a frog turning into a prince is small. So small, in fact, that Richard Dawkins recently spoke out against the story and others like it, asserting that we promote supernaturalism by telling…
A representation of the foundation Snow White story “Schneewittchen” by The Brothers Grimm.
flickr/Ela2007
Snow White’s star is on the rise in 2012. She’s a lead character in the television show Once Upon a Time, and the subject of two major films, Mirror Mirror and Snow White and the Huntsman. Not since Walt…