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Articles on Fairy tales

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Henrique Oliveira, Brazil b.1973. Corupira 2023, commissioned for ‘Fairy Tales’, installation (detail), Gallery of Modern Art (GOMA) Brisbane 2023. Plywood, tapumes veneer and tree branches. Courtesy: Henrique Oliveira. © Henrique Oliveira. Photograph: C Callistemon © QAGOMA.

Fairy Tales at QAGOMA: how we revived these stories with new myths, new media and new quirks

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

My favourite fictional character: I’ll never forget these half-wild, ‘too much’ heroines – Philip Pullman’s Lyra and Elena Ferrante’s Lila

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.
By John Dickson Batten/Wikimedia

What is a goblin?

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 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

How fairy tales shape fighting spirit: Ukraine’s children hear bedtime stories of underdog heroes, while Russian children hear tales of magical success

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?
Fairy tales are extremely moral in their demarcation between good and evil, right and wrong. Marcella Cheng/The Conversation NY-BD-CC

Essays On Air: Why grown-ups still need fairy tales

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.
Edmund Dulac’s 1910 illustration of Sleeping Beauty. Wikimedia images

Friday essay: why grown-ups still need fairy tales

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.
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

How 19th century fairy tales expressed anxieties about ecological devastation

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.

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