Rare edition with unique illustrations. Along with the collections of Andersen, Lang, and the Brothers Grimm, the Fairy tales of Charles Perrault is among the great books of European fairy tales. These stories have been enjoyed by generation after generation of children in many countries, and are here, waiting to be enjoyed again. "Blue beard" is a French folktale, the most famous surviving version of which was written by Charles Perrault and first published by Barbin in Paris in 1697 in Histoires ou contes du temps passe. The tale tells the story of a violent nobleman in the habit of murdering his wives and the attempts of one wife to avoid the fate of her predecessors.

Maria Tatar analyses the many forms the tale of Bluebeard's wife has taken over time, showing how artists have taken the Bluebeard theme and revived it with their own signature twists.

A study of the ever-evolving fairy tale about the murderous aristocrat and his endangered wife

WITH AN INTRODUCTION BY HELEN SIMPSON From familiar fairy tales and legends âe" Red Riding Hood, Bluebeard, Puss in Boots, Beauty and the Beast, vampires and werewolves âe" Angela Carter has created an absorbing collection of dark, sensual, fantastic stories.

This “darkly entertaining” story collection is “a significant contribution to nineteenth-century cultural history, and especially feminist studies" (United Press International). In the 1870s and 1880s, children’s literature saw some astonishingly bold and innovative writing by women authors. As these eleven dark and wild stories demonstrate, fairy tales by Victorian women constitute a distinct literary tradition, one that was startlingly subversive for its time. While writers such as Lewis Carroll and J.M. Barrie wrote nostalgic tales that pined for lost youth, their female counterparts had more serious—at times unsettling—concerns. From Anne Thackeray Ritchie’s adaptations of "The Sleeping Beauty in the Wood" to Christina Rossetti’s unsettling anti-fantasies in Speaking Likenesses, the stories collected here are breathtaking acts of imaginative freedom, by turns amusing, charming, and disturbing. Besides their social and historical implications, they are extraordinary works of fiction, full of strange delights for readers of any age. "The editors’ intelligent and fascinating commentary reveals ways in which these stories defied the Victorian patriarchy."—Allyson F. McGill, Belles Lettres

The author presents a penetrating analysis of the collapse of Western culture during the last half of the twentieth century

In his latest book, fairy tales expert Jack Zipes explores the question of why some fairy tales "work" and others don't, why the fairy tale is uniquely capable of getting under the skin of culture and staying there. Why, in other words, fairy tales "stick." Long an advocate of the fairy tale as a serious genre with wide social and cultural ramifications, Jack Zipes here makes his strongest case for the idea of the fairy tale not just as a collection of stories for children but a profoundly important genre. Why Fairy Tales Stick contains two chapters on the history and theory of the genre, followed by case studies of famous tales (including Cinderella, Snow White, and Bluebeard), followed by a summary chapter on the problematic nature of traditional storytelling in the twenty-first century.

By turns humorous and warm, stark and frightening, Bluebeard's Egg infuses a Canada of the 1940s, '50s and '80s with glowing childhood memories, the harsh realities of parents growing old, and the casual cruelty that men and women inflict on each other. Here is the familiar outer world of family summers at remote lakes, winters of political activism, and seasons of exotic friends, mudane lives and unexpected loves. But here too is the inner world of hidden places and all that emerges from them—the intimately personal, the fantastic and the shockingly real...whether it's what lies in a mysterious locked room or in the secret feelings we all conceal.