Composed in the 1630s, Giambattista Basile’s The Tale of Tales, later known as the Pentameron, is a sophisticated, affectionate, often wicked parody of Boccaccio’s 14th century masterpiece, the Decameron, containing fifty tales within an intricate framing story. Importantly, among its stories are the earliest literary versions of famous fairy tales such as Cinderella, Rapunzel, The Sleeping Beauty and Hansel and Gretel. This is only the fourth translation of the complete text into English. With its scholarly introduction, notes, and up-to-date bibliography, it will appeal to anyone studying European literature or the fairy tale in general, its history and subsequent development, as well as anyone wishing to trace specific themes within the genre and their different treatments.

The first unabridged English translation taken directly from Basile's monumental Lo cunto de li cunti (1634-1636), this edition is fully annotated and illustrated, with an extensive bibliography.

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From Court to Forest is a critical and historical study of the beginnings of the modern literary fairy tale. From Court to Forest is a critical and historical study of the beginnings of the modern literary fairy tale. Giambattista Basile's Lo cunto de Ii cunti written in Neapolitan dialect and published in 1634-36, comprises fifty fairy tales and was the first integral collection of literary fairy tales to appear in Western Europe. It contains some of the best known fairy-tales types, such as Sleeping Beauty, Puss in Boots, Cinderella, and others, many in their earliest versions. Although it became a central reference point for subsequent fairy tale writers, such as Perrault and the Grimms, as well as a treasure chest for folklorists,Lo cunto de Ii cunti has had relatively little attention devoted to it by literary scholars. Lo cuntoconstituted a culmination of the erudite interest in popular culture and folk traditions that permeated the Renaissance. But even if Basile drew from the oral tradition, he did not merely transcribe the popular materials he heard and gathered around Naples and in his travels. He transformed them into original tales distinguished by vertiginous rhetorical play, abundant representations of the rituals of everyday life and the popular culture of the time, and a subtext of playful critique of courtly culture and the canonical literary tradition. This work fills a gap in fairy-tale and Italian literary studies through its rediscovery of one of the most important authors of the Italian Baroque and the genre of the literary fairy tale.

Once upon a time, glass slippers, poison apples, evil stepmothers, fairy godmothers, and princes charming exerted a magnetic hold, cast a magic spell, on adults and children alike. Real-life anxieties fostered a need for stories that assuage. But the world changes, and Maggi asks here whether fairy tales have found a way to transform themselves to keep up. He says no, they haven t. The genre of fairy tale has become contaminated, it has been entitized, like processed food, fossilized as Disney-esque icons. We need to rediscover the marvelous, the oneiric trance of dazzling dreams or horrid torments. We need a new mythic lens to help us understand reality, but to chart what that might be, it is necessary to understand the history of the various traditions of oral and written narrative that intersect with each other across time and space. He goes to Giambattista Basile for the Ur fairy tales, with a special focus on the emblematic Cupid and Psyche myth, an anchor for Maggi s wide-ranging investigation of essential variations on fairy tales (with oppositions of beauty/ugly, human/divine, apparent/real). The transformations of later Italian, French, English, and German traditions come to a head with the Brothers Grimm in 19t-century Germany. Maggi brilliantly weaves the traditions into the 20th century, in memoirs such as those by Joan Didion, in postmodern novels such as Robert Coover s, and, in a final manifestation, in the convulsively, bleakly beautiful movie, "Beasts of the Southern Wild." This book offers profound reflections on reading fairy tales, on the inherent human need for narrative-myth (and, ultimately, for hope), showing us why we tell tales and how these stories transform over time. He offers, in an appendix, the first translation of the original Grimm edition of Basile s 50 tales."