Fairy Tales

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As a princess lointaine, I have always been captivated by fairy tales. I would like a fairy tale life. I dream of marrying Prince Charming and living in a castle.

I love fairies, such as Tinkerbell, Titania, and Gloriana.

I wish to read all of Grimm's and Anderson's fairy tales. I own the Rainbow Fairy Books compiled by Andrew Lang in the Easton Press edition, but have yet to complete reading the collection. I was heartbroken when Easton Press stopped printing the Rainbow Fairy books and over the moon when they found the rest of the books in the collection to sell me.

I read this frame fairy tale, The Pentamerone four and a half years ago after reading The Decameron and The Heptameron. It was amazing! It deviated from the two others as a fairy tale. Although it was a fairy tale, it was for an adult audience as it dealt with mature themes. I really liked that it had a doll in it.
I also love One Thousand and One Arabian Nights. I own the complete unexpurgated edition of One Thousand and One Arabian Nights, with supplemental anthropological notes, by Sir Richard Burton in the Easton Press edition. The edition has beautiful illustrations. And I love that it is the unexpurgated edition by Richard Burton. The fact that he translated One Thousand and One Arabian Nights led me to also buy his translation of the Kama Sutra. I have to admit that I have yet to read the entirety of One Thousand and One Arabian Nights.

I love the first modern fantasy, Phantastes: A Faerie Romance by George MacDonald. I really appreciate the outside-the-box event of Anodos singing the marble lady into life as the White Lady. I also love Alice in Wonderland. I love how Alice is so dreamy and innocent and gets lost in a dreamworld through a rabbit hole. I appreciate the way that the Alice in Wonderland and Through the Looking-Glass are analogized with the games of chess and cards.

 

 

I would like to watch the complete series of Once Upon a Time. I have just watched the pilot episode so far, which I found excellent, as I have been busy. However, watching the whole series on Netflix is first on my list once I clear up my time.

My dissertation is even on fairy tales, my lifelong passion. I write about how the Renaissance writers, Edmund Spenser, William Shakespeare, and Miguel Cervantes employ the medieval romance tropes of fairy and the fairy tale in The Faerie Queene, A Midsummer Night's Dream, and Don Quixote. I interface the texts with J.R.R. Tolkien's "On Fairy Stories." I particularly am excited about my point that Shakespeare portrays that theatre is magic and magic is theatre in
A Midsummer Night's Dream.

 

I really like the current New York Times bestseller, The School for Good and Evil by Soman Chainani. I think that it is awesome that there would be a school for passing into fairy tales! I love the colored map inside The School for Good and Evil. I cannot wait for the sequel in the trilogy, A World Without Princes to come out next month!

Last month, I presented a paper on A Midsummer Night's Dream at a Myths and Fairy Tales panel session in a Pop Culture conference in Albuquerque. The Myths and Fairy Tales panel session was awesome! There were papers on fairies in 18th century British poetics, Angela Carter, and Once Upon a Time in the Myths and Fairy Tales panel session. There was also another paper on fairy tales in a Young Adult panel session. At the end of that panel session, the chair discussed a lot of feminist revisionist fairy tale writers. It made me want to read all of the writers. She said that Jack Zipes is the ultimate fairy tale scholar.
I particularly would like to read Angela Carter's and Jane Yolen's modern fairy tales. Angela Carter writes in the genre of magical realism. I first heard of Angela Carter when  a friend of mine was focusing her graduate degree on Angela Carter. I read The Magic Toyshop years ago. I would like to read Nights at the Circus and Wise Children. I love that Angela Carter writes about the circus, mixing two of my styles, fairy tales and circus, together!

 

I hope to also attend the Renaissance Society of America conference this year as it actually has a Poetics of Fairy Tales panel session! It discusses fairy tales during the Renaissance, which is very relevant to my dissertation. I also hope to attend another Pop Culture conference, the National Popular Culture conference in Chicago during the middle of April. It has many panel sessions on Fairy Tales & Popular Culture. It combines two dimensions of myself, the fairy tale dimension and the teeny bopper dimension. So I am really trying to attend that conference.

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