This book is a journey through the fairy-tale wardrobe, explaining how the mercurial nature of fashion has shaped and transformed the Western fairy-tale tradition. Many of fairy tale’s most iconic images are items of dress: the glass slippers, the red capes, the gowns shining like the sun, and the red shoes. The material cultures from which these items have been conjured reveal the histories of patronage, political intrigue, class privilege, and sexual politics behind the most famous fairy tales. The book not only reveals the sartorial truths behind Cinderella’s lost slippers, but reveals the networks of female power woven into fairy tale itself.

Dress plays a crucial role in fairy tales, signaling the status, wealth, or vanity of particular characters, and symbolizing their transformation. While fairy tales often provide little information beyond what is necessary to a plot, clothing and accessories are often vividly described, enhancing the sense of wonder integral to the genre. Cinderella's glass slipper is perhaps the most famous example, but it is one of many enchanted or emblematic pieces of dress that populate these tales. This is the first book to examine the history, significance, and imagery of classic fairy tales through the lens of high fashion. A comprehensive introduction to the topic of fairy tales and dress is followed by a series of short essays on thirteen stories: Cinderella, Little Red Riding Hood, The Fairies, Sleeping Beauty, Beauty and the Beast, Snow White, Rapunzel, Furrypelts, The Little Mermaid, The Snow Queen, The Swan Maidens, Alice in Wonderland, and The Wizard of Oz. Generously illustrated, these stories are creatively and imaginatively linked to examples of clothing by Comme des Garçons, Dolce and Gabbana, Charles James, and Alexander McQueen, among many others.

In the classic rags-to-riches fairy tale a penniless heroine (or hero), with some magic help, marries a royal prince (or princess) and rises to wealth. Received opinion has long been that stories like these originated among peasants, who passed them along by word of mouth from one place to another over the course of centuries. In a bold departure from conventional fairy tale scholarship, Ruth B. Bottigheimer asserts that city life and a single individual played a central role in the creation and transmission of many of these familiar tales. According to her, a provincial boy, Zoan Francesco Straparola, went to Venice to seek his fortune and found it by inventing the modern fairy tale, including the long beloved Puss in Boots, and by selling its many versions to the hopeful inhabitants of that colorful and commercially bustling city. With innovative literary sleuthing, Bottigheimer has reconstructed the actual composition of Straparola's collection of tales. Grounding her work in social history of the Renaissance Venice, Bottigheimer has created a possible biography for Straparola, a man about whom hardly anything is known. This is the first book-length study of Straparola in any language.

Encyclopedic in its coverage, this one-of-a-kind reference is ideal for students, scholars, and others who need reliable, up-to-date information on folk and fairy tales, past and present. Folktales and fairy tales have long played an important role in cultures around the world. They pass customs and lore from generation to generation, provide insights into the peoples who created them, and offer inspiration to creative artists working in media that now include television, film, manga, photography, and computer games. This second, expanded edition of an award-winning reference will help students and teachers as well as storytellers, writers, and creative artists delve into this enchanting world and keep pace with its past and its many new facets. Alphabetically organized and global in scope, the work is the only multivolume reference in English to offer encyclopedic coverage of this subject matter. The four-volume collection covers national, cultural, regional, and linguistic traditions from around the world as well as motifs, themes, characters, and tale types. Writers and illustrators are included as are filmmakers and composers—and, of course, the tales themselves. The expert entries within volumes 1 through 3 are based on the latest research and developments while the contents of volume 4 comprises tales and texts. While most books either present readers with tales from certain countries or cultures or with thematic entries, this encyclopedia stands alone in that it does both, making it a truly unique, one-stop resource.

Discover a collection of fairy tales unlike the ones you've read before . . . Once upon a time, in the middle of winter, a King sat at a window and sewed. As he sewed and gazed out onto the landscape, he pricked his finger with the needle, and three drops of blood fell onto the snow outside. People have been telling fairy tales to their children for hundreds of years. And for almost as long, people have been rewriting those fairy tales - to help their children imagine a world where they are the heroes. Karrie and Jon were reading their child these stories when they hit upon a dilemma, something previous versions of these stories were missing, and so they decided to make one vital change.. They haven't rewritten the stories in this book. They haven't reimagined endings, or reinvented characters. What they have done is switch all the genders. It might not sound like that much of a change, but you'll be dazzled by the world this swap creates - and amazed by the new characters you're about to discover.

"The present volume contains thirty-five fairy tales by nineteen writers, presented chronologically by author"--Introduction.

Using the magical and mythic language of classic stories from around the world, Fairy Tales takes familiar myths and folktales and turns them into stories about men coming out, learning to trust themselves, looking for and finding love, facing AIDS, and helping those they love.