Angela Carter Book Of Fairy Tales Download
Brandi Baylon
The Bloody Chamber (or The Bloody Chamber and Other Stories) is a collection of short fiction by English writer Angela Carter. It was first published in the United Kingdom in 1979 by Gollancz[1] and won the Cheltenham Festival Literary Prize. The stories share a theme of being closely based upon fairytales or folk tales. However, Carter has stated:
The stories within The Bloody Chamber are explicitly based on fairy tales. Carter was no doubt inspired by the works of author and fairytale collector Charles Perrault, whose fairy tales she had translated shortly beforehand.
Angela Carter's short stories challenge the way women are represented in fairy tales, yet retain an air of tradition and convention through her voluptuously descriptive prose. For example, in the opening tale "The Bloody Chamber", which is a retelling of Bluebeard, Carter plays with the conventions of canonical fairy tales; instead of the heroine being rescued by the stereotypical male hero, she is rescued by her mother.
Neil Murray directed a haunting and erotic theatre production of Carter's story 'The Tiger's Bride' in 2001 at the Gulbenkian Studio, Newcastle Playhouse. Murray comments on his interest in Carter's work and refers to her discussion of fairy tales as 'an important medium.'
Angela Carter (1940-1992) is widely known for her literary fairy tales, particularly those appearing in The Bloody Chamber. Her stylishly creative appropriation and adaptation of fairy-tale patterns, motifs, and content are evident not only her individual tales written for adults but throughout her novels and other fiction.
Editors Danielle M. Roemer and Cristina Bacchilega together with the contributors to this volume investigate Carters approaches to the fair-tale genre. They explore various facets of Carters work and life and open new avenues for further research. Angela Carter and the Fairy Tale is a diverse collection of scholarly essays, fiction, personal reminiscence, and interviews from an international group of scholars, artists, and novelists. Angela Carter and the Fairy Tale will be of interest to those pursuing research in contemporary literature, folklore, and womens studies. It will also serve as a useful reference point for other readers who wish to learn more about the fairy tales written by this dynamic author.
Once upon a time fairy tales weren't meant just for children, and neither is Angela Carter's Book of Fairy Tales. This collection contains lyrical tales, bloody tales and hilariously funny and ripely bawdy stories from countries all around the world - from the Arctic to Asia - and no dippy princesses or soppy fairies. Instead, we have pretty maids and old crones; crafty women and bad girls; enchantresses and midwives; rascal aunts and odd sisters.
The collection of short stories is exactly what it says, a retelling of fairy tales. Charles Perrault was a Frenchman in the 17th century and wrote down these tales which had been passed down orally for centuries. Perrault was the son of a barrister. He took a degree in law but soon tired of the profession and became a secretary to statesman, Jean Baptist Colbert.
On the 75th anniversary of Carter's birth, Penguin Classics has reissued the collection many (including myself) consider her masterpiece, "The Bloody Chamber," with an introduction by Link. Carter hated seeing these stories described as "retellings" of well-known fairy tales, because as far as she was concerned she was dismantling them. A child of south London (from which she was evacuated to Yorkshire during the Blitz) and of the '60s, she was a socialist and atheist. After winning a literary prize in 1969, she took the cash, left her first husband and spent two years living in Tokyo, which is where she acquired her feminism. It was in Japan, she wrote, where she began her "questioning of the nature of my reality as a woman. How that social fiction of my 'femininity' was created."
Although other Carter books are more conventionally "feminist" -- notably "Nights at the Circus," which, in 2012, was voted the best book in the venerable James Tait Black Memorial Prize's 100-year roster of winners -- it is "The Bloody Chamber" that has most enthralled readers. Carter would go on to become a significant figure in the revival of folklore and fairy tales as matter for scholarship and general reading, editing several collections in the early 1990s for Virago, the British press she co-founded with Carmen Calil. Yet she was not unambivalent about these stories, and her heady wranglings with fairy tales, with their complex relationship and appeal to women, ensured that she will not soon be forgotten.
"The Bloody Chamber" dares to insist that not only can we keep what we love about fairy tales -- their sensuality, their daring, their casting off of the constraints of the rational -- but we can even harness them to our own ends. This is why the gorgeousness of Carter's stories is indivisible from their feminism; she holds out the promise of new pleasures to replace the addictive old ones. Even when she is painting a horror, like the seduction of the narrator of "The Erl-King" by a forest elemental with plans to cage her, she uses every brush and tube in her box:
Angela Carter (1940-1992) is widely known for her literary fairy tales, particularly those appearing in The Bloody Chamber. Her stylishly creative appropriation and adaptation of fairy-tale patterns, motifs, and content are evident not only her individual tales written for adults but throughout her novels and other fiction.
Editors Danielle M. Roemer and Cristina Bacchilega together with the contributors to this volume investigate Carter's approaches to the fair-tale genre. They explore various facets of Carter's work and life and open new avenues for further research. Angela Carter and the Fairy Tale is a diverse collection of scholarly essays, fiction, personal reminiscence, and interviews from an international group of scholars, artists, and novelists. Angela Carter and the Fairy Tale will be of interest to those pursuing research in contemporary literature, folklore, and women's studies. It will also serve as a useful reference point for other readers who wish to learn more about the fairy tales written by this dynamic author.
One is never too old for fairy tales. The perfect follow-up to this would be The Bloody Chamber; Carter took her experience of translating Perrault, her knowledge of fairy tales and their morals and ran away with them, turning them on their head as she did so.
Thank you for being inspired by my Angela Carter month (and the stunning cover) and going off-the-beaten-track a little with this one.
But Carter's tales aren't all that simple. Many, including "The Bloody Chamber," feature somewhat flowery sex scenes that bring to mind the words "throbbing member" even if the particular phrase isn't invoked. At first I was put off by this, but you may recall that I claimed there was no misandry in these stories. While some stories describe sex that doesn't seem entirely consensual, the heroines still get something from the interaction. Whether it's relief at it being over and the knowledge that they are strong enough to survive it, or satisfaction of their own, the narrator of each story uses sex deliberately in the telling of the tale as if to spice things up, to deflower the often desexed fairy tales we've grown up hearing. By making it explicit that the women are being sexually objectified (while owning that situation to a greater or lesser extent, depending on the story), Carter defiles the already false safety of fairy tales and criticizes women's often inevitable roles in them.
Another author who uses the fairy tale to great effect is the incredibly prolific Helen Oyeyemi, whose six books all play around with the genre's conventions, drawing from traditions that range from Yoruban to French to English. Her first novel, Icarus Girl, is not a fairy tale as we understand it, but it nevertheless offers the kinds of moral lessons fairy tales often do: Mythical qualities connect to discussions of identity and belonging. In her 2014 novel Boy, Snow, Bird, Oyeyemi writes a version of Snow White that subverts the original's insistence on beauty as equal to skin as white as snow. The whole wicked stepmother thing starts when a woman named Boy gives birth to a dark-skinned child and finds out that her husband has been passing as white by virtue of his light skin.
But Oyeyemi, like Carter, is never heavy handed in her use of metaphor. About Boy, Snow, Bird, she said that she had indeed intended to rewrite Snow White, but "I had to come at it slant because that's how I tend to read fairy tales." The fairy-tale moments in her work are there, whether it's in the use of a classic phrase like "once upon a time," the sense of timelessness even in stories rooted in reality, or the ability to turn things that are mundane (like mirrors and locks and keys) into magical portents.
The absence of magic and enchantment in these stories was beyond disappointing. It was heartbreaking, especially given the soulless writing present in this collection. While it was interesting to get a glimpse into the various fairy tales from around the world, the writing is concise, unengaging and plain. Maybe it was the translation that made them sound too straightforward and blunt, but most of the stories ended up being clunky and emotionless. This is not what I expected from the woman who wrote The Bloody Chamber!
Things dying, things newborn: fairy tales are insistent about families, blood, inheritance, and the need to have children, but the families can have peculiar shapes. The rigmarole that begins Turkish tall tales can even joke about succession: 'When the camel was a town crier, when the flea was a hairdresser, when I rocked my mother's cradle...' In a Burmese tale an old childless couple at last succeed in producing a Little Miss Frog, who speaks with a human voice. She later acquires ugly step-sisters who mistreat her; they are particularly annoyed when the bouquet of a prince falls on Little Miss Frog, meaning he must marry her. There is no immediate transformation scene. 'The prince was also disappointed, but he felt that he should keep his word.' At the end it is unmistakably sad that the wise, trusting prince 'asked his princess never to put on the ugly frog skin again, and the Frog Princess, to accede to his request, threw the skin into the fire.'
aa06259810