Book Review - A Cultural History of Fairy Tales in the Age of the Marvelous, edited by Suzanne Magnanini

A Cultural History of Fairy Tales in the Age of the Marvelous, edited by Suzanne Magnanini. Published by Bloomsbury Academic, 2021.

Book Review by Amie A. Doughty, State University of New York, Oneonta

A Cultural History of Fairy Tales in the Age of the Marvelous, edited by Suzanne Magnanini, is the third volume in the A Cultural History of Fairy Tales series, published by Bloomsbury Academic as part of The Cultural History series exploring various subjects. In her Series Preface, Anne E. Duggan, the series editor, indicates that the series is using a “transnational approach” that challenges ideas about fairy tales as “naïve and timeless stories with universal appeal” and that explores fairy tales’ “very complex cultural history” (ix). She also notes the eight focal themes of each volume in the series: forms of fairy tales, history of adaptations, gender and sexuality, human and non-human boundaries, monster/the monstrous, spaces where the stories take place, the socialization process, and power and ideology. Each volume of the series contains eight chapters, one about each theme.

Suzanne Maganini’s introduction to this volume historicizes the age of the marvelous for this specific volume, 1450-1650, and explains that people in this period had a “fascination with marvels and wonders” in a time of “upheavals” in Europe in areas such as science, economics, religion, and aesthetics(2). She also indicates that this fascination was evident in other parts of the world, particularly in “Islamicate Mediterranean” and Asia (2). The first part of the introduction gives an overview of the articles to come as Magnanini discusses some of the history of this period. Then she shifts to an analysis of “three Italian persecuted maiden tales” published during the age of the marvelous with the goal of “provid[ing] readers of this volume with a better idea of the contours of the fairy tales created in the age of the marvelous” (7). In some ways, Magnanini achieves this goal, as she establishes the main focus of the collection—five of the eight essays focus on Italian fairy tales, primarily written by Giambattista Basile and Giovan Francesco Straparola. However, the second portion of the introduction would be more effective as one of the essays in the collection as a whole than as part of her introduction.

As mentioned above, five of the eight essays in the collection focus on Italian fairy tales. Cristina Mazzoni explores gender and sexuality in Basile and Straparola; Kathleen P. Long explores monsters and the monstrous in early modern French and Italian tales; Davide Papotti explores geographies in Basile; Magnanini explores socialization in early modern Italian fairy tales; and Armando Maggi explores abuse of power, gender, and race in Straparola and Basile. The other three essays focus on non-Italian texts: Kevin Pask explores how rings and riddles in Shakespearean marriage tales relate to fairy tales—notably Italian ones; N. İpek Hüner Cora discusses how translation, adaptation, and retelling are intertwined in Ottoman folk and high literature prose stories; and Laura Nüffer examines animal bridegrooms in Japanese otogizōshi (companion tales). Each of these three essays brings the transnational element of the book series that Duggan references to the fore, though Pask’s seems more connected to the five Italian-focused essays than Cora’s or Nüffer’s essays.

While the individual essays each have their merit, there are a couple of problems with the anthology as a collection of essays. First, each of the essays relies on plot summaries for many of the fairy tales being discussed. If each article were focused on different tales, these summaries would be useful. In fact, Nüffer’s brief summaries of some of the otogizōshi are quite helpful for an audience unfamiliar with those tales. Similarly, some of Cora’s summaries are useful, though she tends to give too much plot summary as a whole without the analysis of the stories to warrant the plot summaries. Further, in the five essays about the Italian tales, there is great overlap in the stories discussed, which leads to several tales, such as “The Pig King” in Straparola and the frame narrative (the tale of Lucia and Princess Zoza) in Basile’s The Tale of Tales, being summarized several times in the volume. Perhaps for someone searching for a single article in the collection, the summaries would not appear excessive, but for a reader of the whole volume, the repeated summaries are unnecessary, particularly since most readers of these articles will be familiar with Basile and Straparola already.

Secondly, the distribution of fairy tales analyzed in the volume is uneven. Five essays focusing on different aspects of Italian fairy tales (with a little French added periodically), one on Shakespeare (with a heavy reference to Italian tales), one on Ottoman stories, and one on Japanese tales is not balanced. If each volume in the series is supposed to be transnational, as Duggan claims, then more diversity of nationality needs to be brought in. However, if the Italian fairy tales and their influence on the fairy tale tradition is the real focus of the book—as it seems to be—then the Ottoman and Japanese chapters should be replaced by chapters focused on adaptation and humans/non-humans in Italian fairy tales. Certainly there is much to say about each of these topics in relation to the Italian tales, just as there is much to say about the Ottoman and Japanese tales outside of issues of adaptation and humans/non-humans. The mix that the volume offers, however, is unbalanced, likely due to the constraints of each volume in the series format, which wants both transnational coverage of tales and coverage of eight specific themes. Given the scope of fairy tale studies, it is impossible to do justice to both of these constraints in a single volume.

Despite these problems with the volume as a whole, many of the individual essays offer excellent analyses of their specific topic. In particular, Nüffer’s analysis of the otogizōshi and the influences of other Asian cultures’ fairy tales offers information about seldom-explored texts in the English-speaking world. Her explanation of the different expectations of fairy tales in Japan, particularly the endings of the animal bridegroom (and animal bride) tales, shows how fairy tales do not, in fact, have universal appeal (as Duggan indicates in her preface). Similarly, Long’s analysis of witches, werewolves, and wild men in French and Italian tales, with her comparisons between prodigy tales and fairy tales, shows the connection between European witch hunts and fairy tales with witches. In addition, her exploration of werewolves and wild men and their different roles in stories reveals other aspects of monsters and monstrosity in the age of the marvelous. The individual essays do not make up for the larger problem of the collection; however, they do offer scholars looking for specific analyses of fairy tales from the age of the marvelous a place to start.

Byline:

Amie Doughty is Professor of English at State University of New York, Oneonta. She teaches classes in children's and YA literature, fantasy, and folk literature, composition, and linguistics, and is the area chair of Children's and YA Literature and Culture for the national PCA. She is the author of 3 monographs and editor of 2 collections of essays about children's and YA literature.