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2021, Children's Readings: Studies in Children's Literature
The review of “Le metamorfosi della fiaba” underlines the importance of concepts such as meta-history and metamorphism in the study of fairy tales. The collection of essays displays a variety of approaches, which allows the reader to tackle this issue from very different points of view. Particular attention is paid to the re-creation and re-mediation of fairy tales according to different narrative media, from oral story to musical theater, from cinema to picture books. The overall impression given by the book is that the metamorphoses of the fairy tale continue to confirm its significance even today and through a symbolic and figurative language reveals the variety of relationships between human beings in an intuitive and polysemantic way.
2011 •
Folklorists have become renowned for concentrating on aspects of form and classification to the detriment of content and meaning. "Metamorphosis" seeks to reverse this tendency in showing, through an examination of the folkloric data, that European fairy tales involve complex symbolism. The book seeks to explain the puzzling contradictory attributes of fairy-tale figures that have discouraged the study of meanings in this field; and it proposes that the workings of metamorphosis in fairy tales reveal a pervasive cyclic ontology that underlies mythology and ritual generally. The issue of universal symbolism is again examined—divested from any "archetypal" generalizations—as a worthy subject of reflection. http://lccn.loc.gov/2002003259"
- CURRENTLY BEING REWORKED INTO A BOOK - SAMPLE DOWNLOAD OF DISSERTATION AVAILABLE This doctoral dissertation aims to transcend certain traditional assumptions that Latin fairy tale-like texts from the premodern period are the mere transcriptions or adaptations of pre-existing folktales. To this purpose, it situates these texts more firmly within their contemporary literary contexts, laying bare their strongly intertextual character. While some Latin “fairy tales” appear to have originated primarily from a creative dialogue with texts from the Latin tradition (as well as vernacular literatures), others actively partake in metaliterary discussions on the nature and desirable functioning of fiction and the marvellous in literature. Meanwhile, several of these texts and others from the Latin tradition have exercised a notable influence on the fairy-tale genre as it developed from Early Modernity onwards. These three topics of intertextual composition, metaliterary significance, and fairy-tale reconfigurations are explored extensively here through a number of case studies, pertaining to Apuleius’ tale of “Cupid and Psyche” (2nd c. AD), the anonymous “Asinarius”-poem (ca. 1200), John of Alta Silva’s “Cygni” 1184-(1212) and “De filio forestarii” from the "Gesta Romanorum" (13th-14th c.).
The aim of this study is to draw new perspectives to the theoretic approach towards the complex nature of the modern fairy tale genre, examining Milne’s books about Winnie-the- Pooh, Jansson’s books about the Moomintrolls, and Raud’s books about Naksitralls. In this thesis, I examine the disputable problem of defining the fairy tale genre in modern literature. I assume that drawing a diachronical perspective over the transformation of the folk fairy tale genre in the literary legacy of children’s authors would give a more complex overview on the genre development. Studying a literary genre requires awareness about its traditional background and development in literary history: it is important to understand whether the genre has got its final “classic form” and is not used in its traditional means anymore, or if this genre has found its continuity and assimilates itself with a new time and a new reader. Fairy tale is a complicated genre that historically derives from folklore with its collective conscience of society. With use of Bakhtin’s terminology and theoretical approach to the folkloric intertext, I defined the following dominating folkloric genre categories, actual in the books I examine: -- Bakhtin’s chronotope, that specifies particular arrangements of time and space, artistically expressed in literature; -- mythological thinking and mythocreation that are incarnated by playing with the map and the superconductivity of fictional time and space; -- fantastic category, mostly presented by fantastic creatures and occasional magic, has realistic realization, as it is in folklore; -- formal and narrative presentation of some folkloric functions in characters (like helpers and personification of nature) get new axiological and semantic interpretation. As a whole, these genre-making categories help to recreate the archaic world-view. Modernism as literary method re-evaluates folkloric aspects such as nonlinear time, the blurred boarders between individual and cosmos, material and spirit, text and reality. Further, I analysed the folkloric intertext in the scope of children’s literature, which I see as the most vital and natural continuation of fairy tale poetics. Authors’ artistically create dialogue between folkloric ‘mytho-logic’ and children’s logic through folkloric intertexts and memory of their own childhood. Jansson, Milne and Raud use the “memory of the genre”, combined with the “memory of childhood”, while coming to a new round in literary history. Authors’ modernistic interpretations of fairy tale poetics build up a new world that shines at its best when seen through the lens of children’s eye. The folkloric laughter intertextually reproduced by naïvism of the Moomins, the Naksitralls, and Winnie-the-Pooh’s friends, while folkloric collective hero is presented by universal harmony of a happy family. Happy-endings were inevitable in folk fairy tales many ages ago, and they are aesthetically justified by children’s addressee in modern fairy tales, too. The way authors create their characters is important from the point of narrative, as Bakhtin says, “the hero creates the world”, and so the child-like protagonists create a very special literary world with larger fictional possibilities. Allegory, so important in folklore, has become a dynamic artistic technique that hides the “adult” meaning behind the aesthetics of a children’s book. Regarding ambivalence of addressing in modern fairy tales, the main category, children’s addressee, should prevail, so that modern fairy tales would be accepted and understood by children, and so that they would carry out the main task – to entertain and teach life. Folk fairy tales have been known to convey this meaning with help of its poetics since the beginning of literature, and that is probably why this genre is considered to be the oldest genre of children’s literature. All these intertextual levels are not to be examined separately from the whole living organism of the fairy tale genre. All the genre dominants presented in this thesis have unique literary realisation, depending on the author’s ideas. The ideas are not separable from the concrete artistic structure they are formed in, whether it is a novel, poetry, or fairy tale.
2020 •
This study aims to highlight how the revisited American fairytale movies shun the archetypal symbols, characters and situations of the previous fairy tales. The researcher analyzes the new set of norms that are proposed by the postmodernists, which are positioned to shun the metanarratives and work against totality by waging war against it (Lyotard 71-82). The perspective in doing so is to find out the changes in the original stories which have challenged the collective unconsciousness. Collective Unconscious, according to Jung, are the unconscious feelings present among human beings as species. They are universally present in every man's psyche, and the unconscious of man has some primal images, which are depicted through symbols. These symbols are not limited to any particular culture or history (Four Archetypes 4). Jung calls the contents of the collective unconscious the "archetypes" (4). Postmodernists have challenged the archetypal patterns stated by the philosop...
Towards Excellence
Perennial Narratives: Relevance of Classical European Fairy Tales in Modern Society2022 •
The beginning of the Common Era brought with it the gift of writing for the world of literature, which witnessed a giant leap in the collection of its oral narratives or tales being penned down to prevent them from disappearing in antiquity. The tales, though existent since centuries in some form or the other, have surprisingly failed to lose their importance even after having continuously existed throughout the ages. They are relevant even in today’s age of technological advancements because they have their roots in peoples’ quests for social, spiritual, moral and cultural progress, akin to aims of technology. They possess the inherent ability to explain the truths of life in a plain and lucid manner, and even provide the inspiration for hope even in the most desperate times. The creativity in the literary rendition of the different humanoids of varied psyche portrayed in the fairy tales is what enables them to maintain their perennial narrative flow without getting lost or ruptured through the sea of time, and to remain relevant even in the modern socio-cultural s...
Anti-Tales: The Uses of Disenchantment
Reader Beware: Apuleius, Metaficion and the Literary Fairy Tale2011 •
Postmodern Reinterpretations of Fairy Tales. How Applying New Methods Generates New Meanings Edited by Anna Kérchy The Edwin Mellen Press, 2011. Hardcover, illustrated, 520 pages ISBN10: 0-7734-1519-X ISBN13: 978-0-7734-1519-5.
Freed Persons in the Roman World Status, Diversity, and Representation
JOLY, F. D. Between Moral Slavery and Legal Freedom: Freed People and Aristocratic Behavior in Neronian Literature. In: BELL, S.; BORBONUS, D.; MACLEAN, R. (ed.). Freed Persons in the Roman World: Status, Diversity, and Representation. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2024, p. 164-188.2024 •
Tree physiology
A test of the hydraulic vulnerability segmentation hypothesis in angiosperm and conifer tree species2016 •
Revue des sciences de l'eau
Approche hydrogéochimique et structurale des circulations dans un réservoir du domaine alpin (massif d'Allevard, France)1989 •
Physiological Psychology
Habenular lesions and avoidance learning deficits in albino rats1974 •
2021 •