The Enchanted Boot

Italian Fairy Tales and Their Tellers

Nancy L. Canepa

• Publisher: Wayne State University Press
• Year: 2022
• eBook ISBN: 9780814349212
• Edition: 0
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: European Literary Collections
• Index: Literature

A representative selection of tales from the Italian fairy-tale tradition, translated into English.

This comprehensive collection of Italian tales in English encourages a revisitation of the fairy-tale canon in light of some of the most fascinating material that has often been excluded from it. In the United States, we tend to associate fairy tales with children and are most familiar with the tales of the Brothers Grimm, Hans Christian Anderson, and Disney. But the first literary fairy tales appeared in Renaissance Italy, and long before the Grimms there was already a rich and sophisticated tradition that included hundreds of tales, including many of those today considered "classic." The authors featured in this volume have, over the centuries, explored and interrogated the intersections between elite and popular cultures and oral and literary narratives, just as they have investigated the ways in which fairy tales have been and continue to be rewritten as expressions of both collective identities and individual sensibilities. The fairy tale in its Italian incarnations provides a striking example of how this genre is a potent vehicle for expressing cultural aspirations and anxieties as well as for imagining different ways of narrating shared futures.

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• Part I. Fairy-Tale Motifs in Early Italian Literature
• Part II. The Birth of the Literary Fairy Tale in Early Modern Italy
• Part III. Sleeping Beauty: The Italian Fairy Tale after Basile
• Part IV. The Golden Age of the Italian Fairy Tale
• Part V. Italo Calvino’s Fiabe Italiane (Italian Folktales)
• Part VI. Something Old, Something New: Fairy Tales for Our Times
• Appendix
• Selected Bibliography
• Credits