Publisher's Synopsis
Most readers associate fairy tales with the work of Charles Perrault and the Grimm brothers, collectors of those traditional and much-loved folk tales retold to each new generation of children. The literary fairy tale, which drew upon this oral tradition but was deliberately composed and written down, developed in the 19th century and has evolved to include some of the best and most original writers of the present day. In "The Oxford Book of Modern Fairy Tales" Alison Lurie has brought together 41 stories by British and American authors representing the full range of a continually developing genre.;This collection has plenty of magic encounters, dragons, witches, and forlorn princesses. Early writers such as Catherine Sinclair, Juliana Horatia Ewing, and Howard Pyle used these conventions to point a moral lesson; later these same elements are subverted to extraordinary effect in tales such as Richard Kennedy's "The Porcelain Man" or Jeanne Desy's "The Princess Who Stood on Her Own Two Feet". The characteristic style and world view, the romantic spirituality or satiric humour of the individual writers colour and shape their tales. From Ruskin, MacDonald, and Dickens through Wilde, Housman and Nesbit the foundations are laid for the explosion of original stories in the 20th century, by writers and diverse as Bernard Malamud, Donald Barthelme, Angela Carter, Ursula Le Guin, and Louise Erdrich.
