Maria Tatar

World-renowned folklorist Maria Tatar reveals an astonishing but long buried history of heroines, taking us from Cassandra and Scheherazade to Nancy Drew and Wonder Woman.

The Heroine with 1,001 Faces

Focusing on six types of tales in variants from around the world, essays explore the genre, cultural implications, and critical history.

Texts, Criticism

The Classic Fairy Tales

Professor Maria Tatar

Twenty-six classic fairy tales are supplemented by extensive literary, cultural, and historical commentary.

The Annotated Classic Fairy Tales

Henry Louis Gates (Jr.)

Collected for the first time, these nearly 150 African American folktales animate our past and reclaim a lost cultural legacy to redefine American literature. Drawing from the great folklorists of the past while expanding African American lore with dozens of tales rarely seen before, The New Annotated African American Folktales revolutionizes the canon like no other volume. Henry Louis Gates Jr. and Maria Tatar assemble a groundbreaking collection of folktales, myths, and legends that revitalize a vibrant African American past untainted by romantic antebellum sentiment or counterfeit nostalgia. Beginning with introductory essays and 20 seminal African tales as historical background, Gates and Tatar present nearly 150 African American stories, among them familiar Brer Rabbit classics, but also stories like "The Talking Skull" and "Witches Who Ride," out-of-print tales from the 1890s Southern Workman, and stories that finally incorporate Caribbean and Latin American literature within the canon. With illuminating annotations and revelatory illustrations, The New Annotated African American Folktales reminds us that stories not only move, entertain, and instruct but, more fundamentally, inspire and keep hope alive. color throughout; 160 illustrations

The Annotated African American Folktales

Nearly every culture tells the story of Beauty and the Beast in one fashion or another. From Cupid and Psyche to India's Snake Bride to South Africa's "Story of Five Heads," the partnering of beasts and beauties, of humans and animals in all their variety--cats, dogs, frogs, goats, lizards, bears, tortoises, monkeys, cranes, warthogs--has beguiled us for thousands of years, mapping the cultural contradictions that riddle every romantic relationship. This book brings together tales from ancient times to the present and from a variety of cultures, highlighting the continuities and the range of themes in a fairy tale that has been used both to keep young women in their place and to encourage them to rebel, and that has entertained adults and children alike.

Classic Tales about Animal Brides and Grooms from Around the World

Beauty and the Beast

Tatar challenges the assumptions we make about childhood reading. By exploring how beauty and horror operate in children's literature, she examines how and what children read, showing how literature transports and transforms children with its intoxicating

Enchanted Hunters: The Power of Stories in Childhood

Maria Tatar analyses the many forms the tale of Bluebeard's wife has taken over time, showing how artists have taken the Bluebeard theme and revived it with their own signature twists.

The Story of Bluebeard and His Wives

Secrets Beyond the Door

Versions of the Snow White story have been shared across the world for centuries. Acclaimed folklorist and translator Maria Tatar places the well-known editions of Walt Disney and the Brothers Grimm alongside other tellings, inviting readers to experience anew a beloved fantasy of melodrama and imagination.

Snow White and 21 Tales of Mothers and Daughters

The Fairest of Them All

Throughout the book, Tatar employs the tools not only of a psychoanalyst but also of a folklorist, literary critic, and historian to examine the harsher aspects of these stories. She presents new interpretations of the powerful stories in this book. Few studies have been written in English on these tales, and none has probed their allegedly happy endings so thoroughly."--BOOK JACKET.

The Hard Facts of the Grimms' Fairy Tales

J. M. Barrie

Annotated Peter Pan

Off with Their Heads! Fairy Tales and the Culture of Childhood

Fairy tales have never known geographical, disciplinary or cultural borders. In many ways, they provide a model for thinking about storytelling on a transnational level long before comparative literature began transforming itself into world literature. As the simple expression of complex thought, fairy tales have increasingly become the focus of intense scholarly inquiry. In this Companion, international scholars from a range of academic disciplines explore the historical origins, cultural dissemination and psychological power of fairy stories, and offer model interpretations of tales from a variety of traditions and sources, including Charles Perrault, the Brothers Grimm and the One Thousand and One Nights. Rather than disenchanting the stories, the essays in this volume broaden our understanding of them and deepen our appreciation of the cultural work they do. A chronology and guide to further reading contribute to the usefulness of the volume for students and scholars.

The Cambridge Companion to Fairy Tales

Peter Davies

A satirical look at fourteen classic fairy tales retells such stories as "Jack and the Beanstalk," "Ali Baba and the Forty Thieves," and "The Little Mermaid."

Or, New Tales for Old

The Fairies Return

"Uma nova interpretação da jornada feminina para reavaliar nossos conceitos sobre o heroísmo e as divisões de gênero no mundo moderno" Neste livro, a folclorista Maria Tatar apresenta uma desconstrução das chamadas verdades universais atemporais, presentes em contos, mitos e narrativas ficcionais e não ficcionais sobre o papel das mulheres. Professora e pesquisadora da Universidade de Harvard, a autora desafia os modelos canônicos de heroísmo presentes em O Herói de Mil Faces, de Joseph Campbell, com sua ênfase masculina em alcançar a glória e a imortalidade. Encontrar as mulheres omitidas em seu relato e definir as respectivas trajetórias heroicas não é tarefa fácil, considerando que Campbell inspirou a cartilha para os diretores de cinema hollywoodianos. Por meio de sua escrita ágil e fácil de entender, Maria Tatar descreve de forma surpreendente os mitos ligados às mulheres - rompendo assim as fronteiras de gênero. Este livro revolucionário nos traz empatia e justiça social como nenhum outro trabalho da história cultural recente a respeito do papel da mulher nas narrativas míticas e históricas."

O resgate do protagonismo feminino na narrativa exclusivamente masculina da jornada do herói

A heroína de 1001 faces

Murder, mutilation, cannibalism, infanticide, and incest: the darker side of classic fairy tales is the subject of this groundbreaking and intriguing study of Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm’s Nursery and Household Tales. This expanded edition includes a new preface and an appendix featuring translations of six tales with commentary by Maria Tatar. Throughout the book, Tatar draws on the disciplinary tools of psychoanalysis and folklore while also providing historical context to explore the harsher aspects of these stories, presenting new interpretations of tales that engage in a kind of cultural repetition compulsion. No other book so thoroughly challenges us to rethink the happily-ever-after of these classic stories.

Expanded Edition

In a book that confronts our society's obsession with sexual violence, Maria Tatar seeks the meaning behind one of the most disturbing images of twentieth-century Western culture: the violated female corpse. This image is so prevalent in painting, literature, film, and, most recently, in mass media, that we rarely question what is at stake in its representation. Tatar, however, challenges us to consider what is taking place--both artistically and socially--in the construction and circulation of scenes depicting sexual murder. In examining images of sexual murder (Lustmord), she produces a riveting study of how art and murder have intersected in the sexual politics of culture from Weimar Germany to the present. Tatar focuses attention on the politically turbulent Weimar Republic, often viewed as the birthplace of a transgressive avant-garde modernism, where representations of female sexual mutilation abound. Here a revealing episode in the gender politics of cultural production unfolds as male artists and writers, working in a society consumed by fear of outside threats, envision women as enemies that can be contained and mastered through transcendent artistic expression. Not only does Tatar show that male artists openly identified with real-life sexual murderers--George Grosz posed as Jack the Ripper in a photograph where his model and future wife was the target of his knife--but she also reveals the ways in which victims were disavowed and erased. Tatar first analyzes actual cases of sexual murder that aroused wide public interest in Weimar Germany. She then considers how the representation of murdered women in visual and literary works functions as a strategy for managing social and sexual anxieties, and shows how violence against women can be linked to the war trauma, to urban pathologies, and to the politics of cultural production and biological reproduction. In exploring the complex relationship between victim and agent in cases of sexual murder, Tatar explains how the roles came to be destabilized and reversed, turning the perpetrator of criminal deeds into a defenseless victim of seductive evil. Throughout the West today, the creation of similar ideological constructions still occurs in societies that have only recently begun to validate the voices of its victims. Maria Tatar's book opens up an important discussion for readers seeking to understand the forces behind sexual violence and its portrayal in the cultural media throughout this century.

Sexual Murder in Weimar Germany

Lustmord

Ingeborg Hoesterey

Ann Fehn

In these compelling new essays, leading critics sharpen our understanding of the narrative structures that convey meaning in fiction, taking as their point of departure the narratological positions of Dorrit Cohn, Grard Genette, and Franz Stanzel. This collection demonstrates how narratology, with its attention to the modalities of presenting consciousness, offers a point of entry for scholars investigating the socio-cultural dimensions of literary representations. Drawing from a wide range of literary texts, the essays explore the borderline between fiction and history; explain how characters are constructed by both author and reader through the narration of consciousness; show how gender shapes narrative strategies ranging from the depiction of consciousness through intertextuality to the representation of the body; address issues of contingency in narrative; and present a debate on the crucial function of person in the literary text. The contributors are Stanley Corngold, Gail Finney, Kte Hamburger, Paul Michael Ltzeler, David Mickelsen, John Neubauer, Thomas Pavel, Jens Rieckmann, Shlomith Rimmon-Kenan, Judith Ryan, Franz Stanzel, Susan Suleiman, Maria Tatar, David Wellbery, and Larry Wolff. Originally published in 1991. The Princeton Legacy Library uses the latest print-on-demand technology to again make available previously out-of-print books from the distinguished backlist of Princeton University Press. These editions preserve the original texts of these important books while presenting them in durable paperback and hardcover editions. The goal of the Princeton Legacy Library is to vastly increase access to the rich scholarly heritage found in the thousands of books published by Princeton University Press since its founding in 1905.

Toward a Critical Narratology

Neverending Stories

Franz Anton Mesmer's concept of animal magnetism exercised a profound influence on key European and American thinkers. Mesmer, who saw in his discovery the secret of health, had hoped to recover the harmony between man and nature by harnessing the power of magnetic fluids. In calling attention to the existence of a second self that surfaces in the hypnotic trance, Mesmer made his real contribution and took the first, decisive steps on the road leading to the unconscious. While most critical studies of mesmerism originate in the history of science or medicine, Maria Tatar's book takes a fresh approach by tracing the impact of mesmerism on literature. The author launches her account with a portrait of Mesmer and places his views in the context of eighteenth-century thought. She then explores the significance of Mesmer's ideas and studies their influence on nineteenth-century German, French, and American writers. In conclusion, she examines the ways in which modern authors absorbed and reshaped the mesmerist legacy bequeathed to them by earlier generations. Whether discussing the electrical energy vibrating through Kleist's dramas, the electrical heat radiating from Hoffmann's figures, the streams of magnetic fluid coursing through Balzac's novels, or the magnetic chain of humanity linking Hawthorne's characters, Professor Tatar recaptures the meaning of ideas, motifs, and metaphors often overlooked by literary critics. Her study illuminates, in a remarkable way, the subtle connections between science, psychology, and literature. Originally published in 1978. The Princeton Legacy Library uses the latest print-on-demand technology to again make available previously out-of-print books from the distinguished backlist of Princeton University Press. These editions preserve the original texts of these important books while presenting them in durable paperback and hardcover editions. The goal of the Princeton Legacy Library is to vastly increase access to the rich scholarly heritage found in the thousands of books published by Princeton University Press since its founding in 1905.

Maria Tatar

About

Books

Join the club