Preserving the Spell
Basile’s "The Tale of Tales" and Its Afterlife in the Fairy-Tale Tradition
- Contents
- Review Quotes
- Awards
Table of Contents
Contents
Dancing Backward: An Introduction
Part One: “Cupid and Psyche,” The Tale of Tales, and the Birth of Western Fairy Tale
1 A Never Ending and Never Told Tale: Basile’s Undoing of “Cupid and Psyche”
2 Orpheus, the King of the Birds, Moves to Sicily with Cupid and Psyche: Laura Gonzenbach’s “King Cardiddu”
3 Melancholy Is the Best Storyteller: Oil, Water, and Blood from Gonzenbach back to Basile
Part Two: The Italian Tales and German Romanticism: The Brothers Grimm, Clemens Brentano, Novalis
4 What We Leave Behind: Fairies, Letters, Rose Petals, and Sprigs of Myrtle
5 The Fairy, the Myrtle, and the Myrtle-Maiden: From Basile to the Grimms and Brentano
6 How to Undo The Tale of Tales: Brentano and the End of Fairy Tales
7 Where Are the Ogresses of Yesteryear? The Neapolitan Cupids and Psyches in the Hands of the Brothers Grimm
8 Beauty, Zulima, and Aline: The Marvel Preceding and Following the World According to Novalis
Part Three: American Postmodernism, Memoirs, and a New Beginning
9 “You Will Never Awaken Because the Story You Were In No Longer Exists”: Coover, Postmodernism, and the End of an Era
10 “Disney World Has Become a Kind of Reverse Lourdes”: From Stanley Elkin back to Basile
11 “A Benign Fairy Tale out of the Brothers Grimm”: Memoirs and the Magic of Reality
12 “Everything Beautiful Is Gone”: Beasts of the Southern Wild and a New Beginning
Appendix: The Grimms’ Adaptations of Basile
Notes
IndexDancing Backward: An Introduction
Part One: “Cupid and Psyche,” The Tale of Tales, and the Birth of Western Fairy Tale
1 A Never Ending and Never Told Tale: Basile’s Undoing of “Cupid and Psyche”
2 Orpheus, the King of the Birds, Moves to Sicily with Cupid and Psyche: Laura Gonzenbach’s “King Cardiddu”
3 Melancholy Is the Best Storyteller: Oil, Water, and Blood from Gonzenbach back to Basile
Part Two: The Italian Tales and German Romanticism: The Brothers Grimm, Clemens Brentano, Novalis
4 What We Leave Behind: Fairies, Letters, Rose Petals, and Sprigs of Myrtle
5 The Fairy, the Myrtle, and the Myrtle-Maiden: From Basile to the Grimms and Brentano
6 How to Undo The Tale of Tales: Brentano and the End of Fairy Tales
7 Where Are the Ogresses of Yesteryear? The Neapolitan Cupids and Psyches in the Hands of the Brothers Grimm
8 Beauty, Zulima, and Aline: The Marvel Preceding and Following the World According to Novalis
Part Three: American Postmodernism, Memoirs, and a New Beginning
9 “You Will Never Awaken Because the Story You Were In No Longer Exists”: Coover, Postmodernism, and the End of an Era
10 “Disney World Has Become a Kind of Reverse Lourdes”: From Stanley Elkin back to Basile
11 “A Benign Fairy Tale out of the Brothers Grimm”: Memoirs and the Magic of Reality
12 “Everything Beautiful Is Gone”: Beasts of the Southern Wild and a New Beginning
Appendix: The Grimms’ Adaptations of Basile
Notes
Index
Part One: “Cupid and Psyche,” The Tale of Tales, and the Birth of Western Fairy Tale
1 A Never Ending and Never Told Tale: Basile’s Undoing of “Cupid and Psyche”
2 Orpheus, the King of the Birds, Moves to Sicily with Cupid and Psyche: Laura Gonzenbach’s “King Cardiddu”
3 Melancholy Is the Best Storyteller: Oil, Water, and Blood from Gonzenbach back to Basile
Part Two: The Italian Tales and German Romanticism: The Brothers Grimm, Clemens Brentano, Novalis
4 What We Leave Behind: Fairies, Letters, Rose Petals, and Sprigs of Myrtle
5 The Fairy, the Myrtle, and the Myrtle-Maiden: From Basile to the Grimms and Brentano
6 How to Undo The Tale of Tales: Brentano and the End of Fairy Tales
7 Where Are the Ogresses of Yesteryear? The Neapolitan Cupids and Psyches in the Hands of the Brothers Grimm
8 Beauty, Zulima, and Aline: The Marvel Preceding and Following the World According to Novalis
Part Three: American Postmodernism, Memoirs, and a New Beginning
9 “You Will Never Awaken Because the Story You Were In No Longer Exists”: Coover, Postmodernism, and the End of an Era
10 “Disney World Has Become a Kind of Reverse Lourdes”: From Stanley Elkin back to Basile
11 “A Benign Fairy Tale out of the Brothers Grimm”: Memoirs and the Magic of Reality
12 “Everything Beautiful Is Gone”: Beasts of the Southern Wild and a New Beginning
Appendix: The Grimms’ Adaptations of Basile
Notes
IndexDancing Backward: An Introduction
Part One: “Cupid and Psyche,” The Tale of Tales, and the Birth of Western Fairy Tale
1 A Never Ending and Never Told Tale: Basile’s Undoing of “Cupid and Psyche”
2 Orpheus, the King of the Birds, Moves to Sicily with Cupid and Psyche: Laura Gonzenbach’s “King Cardiddu”
3 Melancholy Is the Best Storyteller: Oil, Water, and Blood from Gonzenbach back to Basile
Part Two: The Italian Tales and German Romanticism: The Brothers Grimm, Clemens Brentano, Novalis
4 What We Leave Behind: Fairies, Letters, Rose Petals, and Sprigs of Myrtle
5 The Fairy, the Myrtle, and the Myrtle-Maiden: From Basile to the Grimms and Brentano
6 How to Undo The Tale of Tales: Brentano and the End of Fairy Tales
7 Where Are the Ogresses of Yesteryear? The Neapolitan Cupids and Psyches in the Hands of the Brothers Grimm
8 Beauty, Zulima, and Aline: The Marvel Preceding and Following the World According to Novalis
Part Three: American Postmodernism, Memoirs, and a New Beginning
9 “You Will Never Awaken Because the Story You Were In No Longer Exists”: Coover, Postmodernism, and the End of an Era
10 “Disney World Has Become a Kind of Reverse Lourdes”: From Stanley Elkin back to Basile
11 “A Benign Fairy Tale out of the Brothers Grimm”: Memoirs and the Magic of Reality
12 “Everything Beautiful Is Gone”: Beasts of the Southern Wild and a New Beginning
Appendix: The Grimms’ Adaptations of Basile
Notes
Index
Review Quotes
Nancy L. Canepa, Dartmouth College
“A wonderfully original work. Maggi’s analysis is erudite but adventurous, and he is an exacting, inquisitive, and often brilliant, reader. He combines and links the macroscopic—the consideration of major questions in literary and cultural history—and the microscopic—extended close readings—in exemplary fashion. This is a book about fairy tales, but it is also an extended reflection on the fundamental human activity of narration itself—why and how we tell tales, and how these tales transform over time.”
Jack Zipes, Professor Emeritus, University of Minnesota
“Maggi's Preserving the Spell is a highly erudite and enthusiastic study of the influence of the fairy tale in western culture. Beginning with the fabulous Giambattista Basile's ‘dirty’ carnavalesque collection, The Tale of Tales, Maggi moves backward to the myths and stories of the Greco-Roman period and forward to tales, memoirs, and films of our contemporary world to demonstrate how fairy tales have tenaciously informed and formed our lives. He is a brilliant and perceptive critic who has grasped the ebb and flow of oral and literary traditions infused by Basile's spirit. In short, Maggi's incisive study should be compulsory reading for all students and scholars seriously interested in the magic and history of fairy tales.”
Cristina Bacchilega, author of Fairy Tales Transformed?: Twenty-First-Century Adaptations and the Politics of Wonder
“Giambattista Basile’s The Tale of Tales deserves more critical attention, and refreshingly Maggi treats it as key to fairy-tale intertextuality from Apuleius to the Grimms, Robert Coover, and contemporary memoirs. Focused on how irreverence, real-life traumas, and inventive transformations have animated fairy-tale magic across history, Preserving the Spell’s erudite readings are sure to provoke scholarly discussion.”
Maria Tatar, editor of The Annotated Brothers Grimm
“Folklore can tick and whirr just as smoothly in modern times as in times past, and Maggi shows us how and why. Resisting the tendency to fetishize ideal types and create rigid canons, he embraces the transformative energy of magic and malleability in fairy tales. Preserving the Spell moves us out of our intellectual comfort zones and reminds us that the best stories have a high quotient of weirdness.”
Choice
“Several studies of the Italian forebears of present-day fairy tales have recently been published—works by Canepa, Zipes, and Bottigheimer. Maggi goes beyond those studies, offering what is essentially a study of intertextuality: one travels through the centuries, alerted to revisions/rewriting/riffing on the Cupid and Psyche myth. Maggi includes Germans Clemens Brentano, the Grimm brothers, and Novalis and then follows the trail/tale into the postmodern with analyses of works by Robert Coover and Stanley Elkin, memoirs inflected with fairy tale tropes, and the 2012 film Beasts of the Southern Wild. Footnotes citing French, German, Italian, and English sources reveal Maggi’s deep familiarity with the robust scholarship on fairy tales of the past three decades. An appendix provides Maggi’s translations of the Grimm brothers’ versions of 50 Basile tales. . . . Highly recommended.”
Renaissance Quarterly
“Preserving the Spell is a polymathic book that fuses cinematic, historical, literary, philosophical, political, and psychological approaches in an examination of the long, complex tradition of the oral and literary fairy tale; the result is engaging and provocative. . . . Maggi is as adept at close literary analysis as he is insightful at making broader claims about the transformative power of narrative. Preserving the Spell is a generous and highly informative foray into the fairy-tale tradition and a persuasive call to perpetuate its strangeness and magic.”
Ennio Flaiano awards for Italian studies: Golden Pegasus Award
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Literature and Literary Criticism: Germanic Languages | Romance Languages
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