Marina Warner

In this landmark study of the history and meaning of fairy tales, the celebrated cultural critic Marina Warner looks at storytelling in art and legend-from the prophesying enchantress who lures men to a false paradise, to jolly Mother Goose with her masqueraders in the real world. Why are storytellers so often women, and how does that affect the status of fairy tales? Are they a source of wisdom or a misleading temptation to indulge in romancing?

On Fairy Tales and Their Tellers

From the Beast to the Blonde

Explores classical and modern fairy tales to argue that fairy tales are a mirror of human understanding and culture.

A Short History of Fairy Tale

Once Upon a Time

A secret mummy at the Museum of Albion gives way to the stories of the legendary Leto, who slips through time in different guises, always seeking a lost son, as she journeys from pre-history to the present day.

The Leto Bundle

Metamorphosis is a dynamic principle of creation, vital to natural processes of generation and evolution, growth and decay, yet it also threatens personal identity if human beings are subject to a continual process of bodily transformation. Shape-shifting also belongs in the landscape of magic, witchcraft, and wonder, and enlivens classical mythology, early modern fairy tales and uncanny fictions of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. This collection of essays, given as the ClarendonLectures in English 2001, takes four dominant processes of metamorphosis: Mutating, Hatching, Splitting, and Doubling, and explores their metaphorical power in the evication of human personality. Marina Warner traces this story against a background of historical encounters with different cultures, especially with the Caribbean. Beginning with Ovid's great poem, The Metamorphoses, as the founding text of the metamorphic tradition, she takes us on a journey of exploration, into the fantastic artof Hieronymous Bosch, the legends of the Taino people, the life cycle of the butterfly, the myth of Leda and the Swan, the genealogy of the Zombie, the pantomime of Aladdin, the haunting of doppelgangers, the coming of photography, and the late fiction of Lewis Carroll.

Ways of Telling the Self

Fantastic Metamorphoses, Other Worlds

An anthology of enlightening writing by an award-winning critic that engages with art in its social, political, and aesthetic contexts.

Writings on Art & Artists

Forms of Enchantment

Phantasmagoria explores ideas of spirit and soul since the Enlightenment; it traces metaphors that have traditionally conveyed the presence of immaterial forces, and reveals how such pagan and Christian imagery about ethereal beings are embedded in a logic of the imagination, clothing spirits in the languages of air, clouds, light and shadow, glass, and ether itself. Moving from Wax to Film, the book also discusses key questions of imagination and cognition, and probes the perceived distinctions between fantasy and deception; it uncovers a host of spirit forms - angels, ghosts, fairies, revenants, and zombies - that are still actively present in contemporary culture. It reveals how their transformations over time illuminate changing idea about the self. Phantasmagoria also tells the accompanying story about the means used to communicate such ideas, and relates how the new technologies of the Victorian era were applied to figuring the invisible and the impalpable, and how magic lanterns (the phantasmagoria shows themselves), radio, photography and then moving pictures spread ideas about spirit forces. As the story unfolds, the book features the many eminent men and women - scientists and philosophers - who in the Society of Psychical Research applied their considerable energies to the question of other worlds and other states of mind: they staged trance seances in which mediums produced spirit phenomena, including ectoplasm. The book shows how this often embarrassing story connects with some of the important scientific discoveries of a fertile age, in psychology and physics. Over a sequence of twenty-eight chapters, with over thirty illustrations in colour and black and white, Phantasmagoria thus tells an unexpected and often uncomfortable story about shifts in thought about consciousness and the individual person, from the first public waxworks portraits at the end of the eighteenth century to stories of hauntings, possession, and loss of self asin the case of the zombie, a popular figure of soulessness, in modern times.

Spirit Visions, Metaphors, and Media Into the Twenty-first Century

Phantasmagoria

WINNER OF THE NATIONAL BOOK CRITICS CIRCLE AWARD 2012 WINNER OF THE TRUMAN CAPOTE AWARD 2013 WINNER OF THE SHEIKH ZAYED BOOK AWARD 2013 Magic is not simply a matter of the occult arts, but a whole way of thinking, of dreaming the impossible. The supreme fiction of magical thinking is the Arabian Nights, with its flying carpets, hidden treasure and sudden revelations. As part of her exploration into the prophetic enchantments of the Nights, Marina Warner retells some of the most wonderful and lesser-known stories. She explores the figure of the dark magician or magus, from Solomon to the wicked uncle in 'Aladdin'; the complex vitality of the genies or jinn; and animal metamorphoses. With startling originality and impeccable research, this groundbreaking book shows how magic, in the deepest sense, helped to create the modern world, and how profoundly it is still inscribed in the way we think today.

Charmed States & the Arabian Nights

Stranger Magic

From a highly original and profound commentator on the culture of the past and present comes this superb 25-year retrospective collection of her finest essays on fiction, drama, religion and fairy-tale.

Essays on Literature & Culture

Signs & Wonders

Inspired by The Tempest, INDIGO traces the scars of colonialism across continents, family blood-lines and three centuries. Rich, sensual and magical in its use of myths and fairytales INDIGO explores the intertwined histories of the Everard family and the imaginary Caribbean island where Ariel, Caliban, and his mother, the healer and dyer of indigo, Sycorax once lived.

Indigo Or, Mapping the Waters

Brian Dillon

Roger Malbert

Artists featured include Tacita Dean, Katie Paterson, Nina Canell, Pablo Bronstein, Charles Le Brun, Gerard Byrne, Phillip Henry Gosse, John Dee, Adam Broomberg and Oliver Chanarin, Corinne May Botz, Gunda Forster, Matt Mullican, Toril Johannessen, Anna Atkins, Nina Katchadourian, Laurent Grasso, Salvatore Arancio, Aurelien Froment, Leopold and Rudolph Blaschka, and the taxidermy of Thomas Grunfeld.

Art and the Pleasures of Knowing

Curiosity

Shows how the figure of Mary has shaped and been shaped by changing social and historical circumstances and why for all their beauty and power,the legends of Mary have condemned real women to perpetual inferiority.

The Myth and the Cult of the Virgin Mary

Alone of All Her Sex

Steven Heller

Sara Fanelli

Award-winning artist and illustrator Sara Fanelli's inspiration lies not only in the visual arts but also in literature and the theatre. "Sometimes I Think, Sometimes I Am" is a remarkable creation, in which Fanelli takes the quotations and aphorisms that inspire her work. This book contains five 'chapters' that make up this unique work.

Sometimes I Think, Sometimes I Am

Entrancing, multi-layered and as wittily subversive as fairy tales themselves, this beautifully illustrated work explores and illuminates the unfolding history of famous fairy tales and the contexts in which they flourished. It also lifts the curtain on the tellers themselves - from ancient sibyls and old crones to the more modern Angela Carter and, of course, Walt Disney. A brilliant compendium of folklore, fairytales and learning which reveals unexpected links and histories behind some of our oldest and most-loved tales.

From The Beast To The Blonde

By one of the finest English writers of our time, a luminous memoir that travels from southern Italy to the banks of the Nile, capturing a lost past both personal and historical. Esmond and Ilia follows Ilia, Marina Warner’s beautiful, penniless young mother, as she leaves southern Italy in 1945 to travel alone to London. Her husband, an English colonel, is still away in the war in the East as she begins to learn how to be Mrs. Esmond Warner, an Englishwoman. With diamond rings on her fingers and brogues on her feet, Ilia fearlessly enters the world of cricket and riding. But without any prospect of work in a bleak, war-ravaged England, Esmond remembers the glorious ease of Cairo during his periods of leave from the desert campaign. There, he and Ilia start a bookshop, a branch of W.H. Smith’s. But growing resistance to foreign interests, especially British, erupts in the 1952 uprising, and the Cairo fire burns the city clean. Evocative and imaginative, at once historical and speculative, this memoir powerfully resurrects the fraught union and unrequited hopes of Warner’s parents. Memory intertwines richly with myth, the river Lethe feeling as real as the Nile. Vivid recollections of Cairo swirl with ever-present dreams of a city where Warner’s parents, friends, and associates are still restlessly wandering.

An Unreliable Memoir

Esmond and Ilia

«Proviamo a pensare alla fiaba come a un genere vegetale – per esempio le rose, i funghi o l’erba – che si diffonde, si radica e fiorisce qua e là, cambiando specie, colore, grandezza e forma a seconda del luogo in cui cresce. Oppure come a una melodia, che migra da una voce a una sinfonia o a un piffero, perché la fiaba non esiste in una forma o in un mezzo prefissati. Nessuna frontiera può impedire a una buona storia di vagare per il mondo. Essa si mette in viaggio, si spinge lontano, e poi torna indietro in una for¬ma diversa, con uno spirito differente e, soprattutto, un significato nuovo».

Regine malvagie e splendide principesse, gnomi bonari, elfi malefici, ombrosi giganti, e poi ancora scarpette di cristallo, mele avvelenate, chiavi d’oro e specchi magici – i personaggi e gli oggetti delle fiabe continuano da secoli a stregare lettori e spettatori, grandi e piccoli. Sin dalla notte dei tempi, queste storie fantastiche riescono a valicare ogni confine e a tramandarsi di generazione in generazione, mai uguali e sempre rinnovate dal loro passaggio di bocca in bocca. Poche altre forme letterarie hanno il medesimo potere di incantarci e di accendere la nostra immaginazione. Ma che cos’è una fiaba? Da dove proviene, e qual è il suo significato? Cos’ha da comunicarci riguardo alla morale, alla sessualità e alla società? Il raggio d’azione delle fiabe si estende all’infinito nel tempo e nello spazio; la loro storia si intreccia a quella del folklore e del mito e trae ispirazione dalle diverse concezioni della natura e del soprannaturale, dall’immaginazione e dalla fantasia, offrendo a sua volta un ricco materiale per ulteriori riflessioni e indagini, dalla psicoanalisi al pensiero femminista. Marina Warner ha dedicato tutta una vita a scrivere di fiabe con grande passione, e in questa magistrale sintesi esplora una moltitudine di storie di ogni epoca e le diverse forme che esse hanno preso via via sulla pagina, sul palcoscenico e sullo schermo. Dal loro prepotente imporsi nella letteratura di epoca vittoriana fino alle tante storie contemporanee per bambini, Warner srotola sotto i nostri occhi un luccicante campionario di esempi, dai classici, come Cenerentola e La bella addormentata nel bosco di Perrault, o Cappuccetto rosso In nove ricchi e sintetici capitoli, Marina Warner porta alla luce un forziere di fiabe nelle loro varianti fantastiche e brillanti con l’intento di definire un genere e valutare una forma di letteratura che si tramanda a cavallo delle epoche e della storia, a dimostrazione di come la fiaba sia depositaria di conoscenza e di culture. e Hänsel e Gretel dei Grimm, o la Sirenetta di Andersen, fino alle trasposizioni sullo schermo, dalla fabbrica Disney all’industria di Hollywood, passando attraverso le riscritture perturbanti di Angela Carter e le immersioni nel fantasy.

Piccola storia della fiaba

C'era una volta

Masallarin Kisa Tarihi

Bir Zamanlar Bir Ülkede...

"Marina Warner begins with the gospels, noting the slight allusions to Mary, and the curious confusions between the two women of that name. She points out the falsities, fables and manifest fabrications that have shaped mariolatry. This intriguing and intelligent book is an attempt to explain the origins, growth, appeal and persistence of the Virgin's cult. The narrative is a rich, allusive tapestry set in a framework of theological commentary." -New Society

The Myth and Cult of the Virgin Mary

Anne Rice

Stephen King

Michel Foucault

Judith Halberstam

William Gibson

Robert Louis Stevenson

Andrew O'Hagan

Umberto Eco

Slavoj Žižek

Sigmund Freud

Jean Baudrillard

Mike Kelley

Beatriz Colomina

James Sampson Meyer

Mary Shelley

Patrick McGrath

Jeff Wall

Jacques Lacan

Hal Foster

Jerry Saltz

Damien Hirst

Amelia Jones

Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick

Nancy Spector

Julia Kristeva

Edmund Burke

Mark Edmundson

Richard Dyer

Bret Easton Ellis

Edgar Allan Poe

Richard Davenport-Hines

Douglas Crimp

Gianni Jetzer

Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak

Carol J. Clover

Trevor J. Fairbrother

Anthony Vidler

Elisabeth Bronfen

Bruce Hainley

Carolyn Christov-Bakargiev

Kate Ferguson Ellis

Kobena Mercer

Stan Douglas

Alex Farquharson

Jane D. Marsching

Mark Alice Durant

Nike Bätzner

Michael Cohen (kustos.)

Tacita Dean

Christoph Grünenberg

Jonathan Jones (likovni kritik.)

Shamim Momin

Andrew Ross (Professor of Social and Cultural Analysis.)

Jaques Derrida

Part of the acclaimed 'Documents of Contemporary Art' series of anthologies. This collection of writings examines the pervasive and influential role of the Gothic in contemporary art, providing the first comprehensive overview of its uses within contemporary visual culture. The Gothic includes artists' writings by Mike Kelley, Damien Hirst, Tacita Dean, Jonathan Meese and Catherine Sullivan, complemented by literary extracts from Horace Walpole, William Gibson, Bret Easton Ellis and Stephen King, and theoretical writings by such key thinkers as Carol Clover, Beatriz Colomina, Julia Kristeva, Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, Marina Warner and Slavoj Žižek. Artists surveyed include Matthew Barney, Louise Bourgeois, Tacita Dean, Sue de Beer, Janet Cardiff, Mark Dion, Stan Douglas, Robert Gober, Douglas Gordon, Dan Graham, Damien Hirst, Mike Kelley, Paul McCarthy, Teresa Margolles, Jonathan Meese, Raymond Pettibon, Paul Pfeiffer, Gregor Schneider, Cindy Sherman, Catherine Sullivan, Andy Warhol, and Jane and Louise Wilson. Writers include Jean Baudrillard, Elizabeth Bronfen, Edmund Burke, Carol Clover, Beatriz Colomina, Douglas Crimp, Jacques Derrida, Richard Dyer, Umberto Eco, Bret Easton Ellis, Trevor Fairbrother, Alex Farquharson, Hal Foster, Michel Foucault, Sigmund Freud, William Gibson, Christoph Grunenberg, Bruce Hainley, Judith Halberstam, Amelia Jones, Jonathan Jones, Mike Kelley, Julia Kristeva, Jacques Lacan, Patrick McGrath, Kobena Mercer, James Meyer, Edgar Allan Poe, Andrew Ross, Jerry Saltz, Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, Mary Shelley, Nancy Spector, Robert Louis Stevenson, Anthony Vidler, Jeff Wall, Horace Walpole, Marina Warner, Anne Williams and Slavoj Žižek.

The Gothic

Long-listed for the 2016 Edge Hill Short Story PrizeFly Away Home is Marina Warner's third - and eagerly-awaited - collection of short stories. Inspired by fairy tales, legends, and mythology, this timeless selection explores the themes of love and war - in families, and between generations.In 'Mélusine' a gorgeous mermaid encounters disaster in love and visits her aunt, Morgan le Fay, to pour out her woes ; in 'Breadcrumbs' a hospital patient overhears a night nurse recounting an extraordinary tale of family torn apart under terrifying circumstances. 'Out of the Burning House' introduces an elderly actor recalling an unusual case of heartbreak at the hands of a TV personality; in 'The Difference in the Dose' a young mother becomes increasingly anxious about the rift between herself and her adoptive mother. And in 'Letter to an Unknown Soldier' a thirteen year-old girl writes a heartrending second letter to an older brother away at war, having had no reply to her first...Like her award-winning novels, Marina Warner's stories conjure up mysteries and wonders in a physical world, treading a delicate, magical line between the natural and the supernatural, between openness and fear. An elegant mix of the poignant, the caustic, and the bizarre, Fly Away Home will be treasured by fans and new readers alike.

Stories

Fly Away Home

Robert Kirk

A classic, enchanting document of Scottish folklore about fairies, elves, and other supernatural creatures. Late in the seventeenth century, Robert Kirk, an Episcopalian minister in the Scottish Highlands, set out to collect his parishioners' many striking stories about elves, fairies, fauns, doppelgängers, wraiths, and other beings of, in Kirk's words, "a middle nature betwixt man and angel." For Kirk these stories constituted strong evidence for the reality of a supernatural world, existing parallel to ours, which, he passionately believed, demanded exploration as much as the New World across the seas. Kirk defended these views in The Secret Commonwealth, an essay that was left in manuscript when he died in 1692. It is a rare and fascinating work, an extraordinary amalgam of science, religion, and folklore, suffused with the spirit of active curiosity and bemused wonder that fills Robert Burton's Anatomy of Melancholy and the works of Sir Thomas Browne. The Secret Commonwealth is not only a remarkable document in the history of ideas but a study of enchantment that enchants in its own right. First published in 1815 by Sir Walter Scott, then reedited in 1893 by Andrew Lang, with a dedication to Robert Louis Stevenson, The Secret Commonwealth has long been difficult to obtain--available, if at all, only in scholarly editions. This new edition modernizes the spelling and punctuation of Kirk's little book and features a wide-ranging and illuminating introduction by the critic and historian Marina Warner, who brings out the originality of Kirk's contribution and reflects on the ongoing life of fairies in the modern mind.

Of Elves, Fauns, and Fairies

The Secret Commonwealth

Marina Warner

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