Saturday, October 11, 2014

Ten top fairytales

Marina Warner's award-winning studies of mythology and fairy tales include Alone of All Her Sex: The Myth and the Cult of the Virgin Mary, Stranger Magic: Charmed States & the Arabian Nights, From the Beast to the Blonde - on Fairy Tales and their Tellers, Monuments & Maidens: The Allegory of the Female Form, and No Go the Bogeyman: Scaring, Lulling and Making Mock. Her Clarendon Lectures Fantastic Metamorphoses; Other Worlds were published in 2001; her essays on literature and culture were collected in Signs & Wonders, and Phantasmagoria, a study of spirits and technology. Her new book is Once Upon a Time: A Short History of Fairy Tale.

At The Guardian, Warner tagged her ten top fairytales, including:
Possession by AS Byatt

Byatt dazzlingly folds many stories of enchantments, one inside the other, and embroiders on the medieval figure of Melusine, the precursor of several other watery fairies, such as Andersen’s The Little Mermaid and Undine by La Motte Fouqué.
Read about another entry on the list.

Possession also appears on Ester Bloom's top ten list of fictional feminists, Niall Williams's list of ten of the best books that manage to make heroes out of readers, Kyle Minor's list of fifteen of the hottest affairs in literature, Emily Temple's list of the fifty greatest campus novels ever written, John Mullan's lists of ten of the best fossils in literature, ten of the most memorable libraries in literature, ten of the best fictional poets, ten of the best locks of hair in fiction, ten of the best graveyard scenes in fiction, and ten of the best lawyers in literature, and on Rachel Syme's list of the ten most attractive men in literature, Christina Koning's critic's chart of six top romances, and Elizabeth Kostova's top ten list of books for winter nights.

--Marshal Zeringue