0,49 €
Niedrigster Preis in 30 Tagen: 1,99 €
Niedrigster Preis in 30 Tagen: 1,99 €
Mehr erfahren.
- Herausgeber: Booksell-Verlag
- Kategorie: Für Kinder und Jugendliche
- Sprache: Englisch
Andrew Lang's "The Pink Fairy Book" offers a delightful collection of fairy tales that showcases the richness of global folklore, each story intricately woven with enchanting narratives and imaginative elements. Written in the late 19th century, a period marked by a renewed interest in folklore, Lang employs a lyrical style that captures the whimsical spirit of traditional tales while also infusing them with a Victorian sensibility. The book features diverse stories from a variety of cultures, demonstrating Lang's commitment to preserving the oral traditions that have shaped storytelling across the ages. Lang, a Scottish poet, novelist, and literary critic, was a prominent figure in the fairy tale revival movement. His fascination with mythology and folklore, spurred by his extensive travels and academic background, led him to curate and adapt tales that resonated with both children and adults. His scholarly approach combined with an appreciation for the fantastical allowed him to explore the moral and ethical underpinnings often present in these age-old stories, thus highlighting their relevance in contemporary society. Readers are warmly invited to delve into "The Pink Fairy Book," a treasure trove that not only entertains but also enriches the imagination. This anthology serves as an excellent gateway for those new to fairy tales, while also offering seasoned readers a fresh perspective on familiar narratives. Ideal for both bedtime reading and scholarly study, Lang's work invites readers to celebrate the timeless magic of storytelling. In this enriched edition, we have carefully created added value for your reading experience: - An Introduction draws the threads together, discussing why these diverse authors and texts belong in one collection. - Historical Context explores the cultural and intellectual currents that shaped these works, offering insight into the shared (or contrasting) eras that influenced each writer. - A combined Synopsis (Selection) briefly outlines the key plots or arguments of the included pieces, helping readers grasp the anthology's overall scope without giving away essential twists. - A collective Analysis highlights common themes, stylistic variations, and significant crossovers in tone and technique, tying together writers from different backgrounds. - Reflection questions encourage readers to compare the different voices and perspectives within the collection, fostering a richer understanding of the overarching conversation.
Das E-Book können Sie in Legimi-Apps oder einer beliebigen App lesen, die das folgende Format unterstützen:
Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2019
Ähnliche
The Pink Fairy Book
Table of Contents
Introduction
Gathered here are wonder tales that speak across languages and landscapes, linked by a shared devotion to marvels, ordeals, and moral imagination. Names well known to readers of such narratives meet alongside sources signaled as Sicilianische Mahrchen, Cuentos Populars Catalans, Japanische Marchen und Sagen, and the Bibliotheque des Fees et aes Genies, with figures such as Hans Christian Andersen, the Brothers Grimm, and Laura Gonzenbach in the foreground. Together these strands create a conversation among courts and cottages, forests and markets, seas and skies, where princes, merchants, animals, and spirits step into the same bright circle.
Transformation and enchantment form one of the strongest threads. In Andersen’s The Snow-queen, and in winter pieces like Snowflake and The Snow-man, cold and clarity test the heart, while The Fir-tree and The Shirt-collar give voice to objects and remind that even the inanimate may bear longing. Figures of metamorphosis appear in King Lindorm and The Troll’s Daughter, while The Slaying of the Tanuki and The Sparrow with the Slit Tongue suggest that animal lives and human fortunes are entangled in subtle ways.
A contrasting current celebrates wit as a force equal to strength. How the Dragon Was Tricked and The Cunning Shoemaker prize ingenuity, and Master and Pupil explores the hazards and responsibilities of knowledge. I Know What I Have Learned, The Story of Ciccu, and Don Giovanni De La Fortuna turn on experiments in prudence, luck, and audacity, while The Bird ‘Grip’ evokes the unexpected allies that cleverness may summon. These tales treat cunning not as mere mischief but as a means of navigating power and peril.
Quests and trials provide another shared architecture. The Water of Life, The Golden Lion, The Sprig of Rosemary, and The White Dove point to journeys measured by rare tokens and faithful companions. The Three Brothers weighs rivalry against solidarity, and Esben and the Witch sets craft against menace; Princess Minon-minette and The Princess in the Chest consider constraints that enclose a life and the courage required to open what has been sealed. Across these journeys, endurance and discernment matter as much as daring.
Questions of fate and choice recur with particular urgency. Catherine and Her Destiny names the riddle directly, while The Man Without a Heart presses toward the limits of empathy and justice. How the Hermit Helped to Win the King’s Daughter and The King Who Would Have a Beautiful Wife examine counsel, desire, and the trials they invite, and The Wounded Lion and The Two Brothers affirm that kinship and compassion carry their own tests. Maiden Bright-eye, The Merry Wives, and Peter Bull broaden the field to community and household, where wit and kindness must find daily forms.
The settings themselves are alive with meaning. The House in the Wood returns to the forest as a proving ground; The Goblin and the Grocer glances toward the city’s bargains and values. Seafaring and shorelines guide Uraschimataro and the Turtle and Hans, the Mermaid’s Son, while The Flying Trunk imagines travel of a different sort. Animal fables and companionship shape The Cat’s Elopement, The Jackal, the Dove, and the Panther, The Little Hare, and again The Sparrow with the Slit Tongue, and the tonal range from Cuentos Populars Catalans to Sicilianische Mahrchen shows how common patterns adapt to distinct soils.
Read together, these works offer a many-voiced reflection on agency, loyalty, and hope. Andersen, the Brothers Grimm, and Laura Gonzenbach stand alongside materials associated with Sweden and Denmark, with Sicilianische Mahrchen, Cuentos Populars Catalans, the Bibliotheque des Fees et aes Genies, and Japanische Marchen und Sagen widening the circle of imagination. Their enduring appeal lies in the balance of wonder and wisdom: a recognition that courage needs craft, that power invites responsibility, and that the world is most fully seen when human and nonhuman lives are understood as neighbors in the same story.
Historical Context
Socio-Political Landscape
The Pink Fairy Book assembles tales whose nineteenth-century circulation threaded through shifting monarchies and nation-building. Denmark, home to Hans Christian Andersen, balanced constitutional monarchy with an expanding bourgeois public. German sources associated with the Brothers Grimm moved from fragmented principalities into post-1871 empire, while Sicily’s Laura Gonzenbach published Sicilianische Mährchen at Leipzig, Engelmann, 1870, amid Italy’s recent unification. Swedish and Danish pieces echo Nordic constitutional settlements, and Catalan materials register regional assertion within Spain. Japanese narratives, rendered via Japanische Märchen und Sagen, arrived as the Meiji state modernized and negotiated Western power. Publishing houses, translators, and salons mediated these crossings under tightening but variable moral regimes.
Industrial growth and urbanization altered everyday rhythms across Copenhagen, Leipzig, and Palermo, yet rural memory persisted in narratives of kings, peasants, trolls, and artisans. The anthology’s Scandinavian, German, Sicilian, Catalan, and Japanese selections register stratified worlds where lineage, guild skill, and village custom set horizons, while marriage remains a public contract entangled with property and prestige. Patriarchal authority shapes many situations, yet figures in Catherine and Her Destiny, The Merry Wives, and The Cunning Shoemaker test boundaries of domestic and economic power. Commercial book markets, schools, and periodicals fostered circulation, but prudish gatekeepers softened violence and sexuality, recasting tradition within respectable, family-oriented reading.
Translation and patronage networks structured which voices traveled. Miss Alma Alleyne’s rendering of The Snow-queen exemplifies women translators’ growing but precarious authority, often constrained by editors’ decorum. Laura Gonzenbach, producing Sicilianische Märchen in a male-dominated scholarly world, navigated bourgeois sponsors and the new Italian state’s folkloric ambitions. Protestant North and Catholic South offered distinct moral horizons for wonder tales, with catechisms, Sunday schools, and charitable presses policing tone. Printers in Leipzig and Copenhagen leveraged cheaper paper and rail distribution to reach households, while informal salons and reading circles legitimized fantastical material by framing it as folklore, language study, and child-rearing aid.
Intellectual & Aesthetic Currents
The anthology spans Enlightenment legacies and Romantic idealism. Grimm-derived pieces such as The House in the Wood and The Three Brothers embody a Volksgeist ethos: terse structures, archetypal trials, and communal wisdom. Andersen’s The Flying Trunk, The Snow-man, The Fir-tree, and The Shirt-collar fuse lyric melancholy with modern irony, transforming everyday objects into meditative figures and subjecting vanity to gentle satire. Danish narratives like Master and Pupil or Maiden Bright-eye favor moral clarity yet flirt with ambiguity, while Swedish materials and King Lindorm court the uncanny. Together they balance didactic impulses with an inward, affective exploration of longing, fate, and ethical choice.
Parallel arts and sciences broadened horizons. Steam presses, railways, and photography accelerated circulation and standardized imagery, while illustration cycles reframed tales like The Troll’s Daughter or The Bird ‘Grip’ as visual spectacles. Theatre and pantomime popularized capricious transformations that echo through Esben and the Witch. Darwinism unsettled fixed hierarchies, sharpening interest in metamorphosis and nature’s agency that readers discern in Andersen’s seasonal meditations and in animal-centered episodes. Electricity’s wonder fed urban enchantment in The Flying Trunk. Oral performance remained vital: Sicilian storytelling captured by Gonzenbach and Japanese pieces such as The Sparrow with the Slit Tongue reflect cadence, proverb, and audience interaction.
By the fin de siècle, Realism challenged the fairy tale’s improbabilities, yet Symbolist and decadent tastes recuperated its suggestive atmospheres. Rival orientations surface implicitly: Grimm-style austerity versus Andersen’s authored voice; Gonzenbach’s ethnographic fidelity against salon polish glimpsed in Princess Minon-minette from the Bibliotheque des Fees et des Genies. Southern narratives like The Golden Lion or Don Giovanni De La Fortuna value wit and fortune, aligning with a Mediterranean comic tradition, while Catalan items stress regional idiom. The Cunning Shoemaker and Master and Pupil dramatize craft and knowledge, echoing debates over folk pedagogy versus institutional schooling that animated contemporary literary societies.
Legacy & Reassessment Across Time
Twentieth-century upheavals reframed reception. After world wars and fascist appropriations of folklore in Germany and Italy, readers approached Grimm-related pieces and Sicilianische Märchen with caution, privileging critical editions and contextual notes. Decolonization and transpacific scholarship reassessed Japanische Märchen und Sagen, probing Orientalist filters in versions of Uraschimataro and the Turtle or The Sparrow with the Slit Tongue. Victorian bowdlerization gradually receded; copyright expirations opened Andersen and Gonzenbach to fresh translators, including gender-aware choices revisiting The Snow-queen, Catherine and Her Destiny, and The Merry Wives. Environmental readings of The Fir-tree and Snowflake explored resource extraction, seasonality, and human-nature reciprocity.
Adaptation sustained visibility. Andersen’s pieces and Grimm-related items inspired stage works, radio readings, chamber ballets, and animations; The Snow-queen proved especially pliable. Southern European tales such as The Story of Ciccu and Don Giovanni De La Fortuna fed comic theatre, while King Lindorm and The Man Without a Heart invited psychological staging. Preservation advanced through annotated scholarly series and digitized facsimiles; the lapse of rights broadened classroom use worldwide. Current debates press on ethics of translation and localization, urging transparency for Princess Minon-minette and Catalan and Japanese sources. Animal-centered tales, from The Wounded Lion to The White Dove, attract ecocritical reinterpretation.
Synopsis (Selection)
Preface
Lang introduces the volume, outlining its international sources, editorial aims, and the character of the tales selected.
The Cat’s Elopement
Two cats in love defy their owners and elope, braving natural and human dangers as they seek a safe home.
How the Dragon Was Tricked
A quick-witted youth uses disguises and stratagems to deceive a fearsome dragon and free its captives.
The Goblin and the Grocer
A house goblin torn between his love of good food and the lure of poetry discovers the value of imagination in a student’s attic.
The House in the Wood
Three sisters are tested in a forester’s enchanted house; only one shows kindness to the animals and is deemed worthy.
Uraschimataro and the Turtle
A fisherman who rescues a turtle visits an undersea palace and returns to find time has passed in a strange way.
The Slaying of the Tanuki
A cruel tanuki torments a household until a clever rabbit engineers a series of tricks that bring the creature to justice.
The Flying Trunk
An impoverished merchant’s son rides an enchanted trunk to a distant kingdom and woos a princess with tales, but his vanity imperils his fortune.
The Snow-man
A snowman, fascinated by the warmth of a stove he cannot comprehend, longs for the impossible as the seasons turn.
The Shirt-collar
A vain shirt-collar misreads every encounter as admiration, only to learn how quickly fashion and favor pass.
The Princess in the Chest
A haunted chamber containing a mysterious chest unhinges all guards until a resolute youth faces the specter and uncovers its secret.
The Three Brothers
Three brothers set out to master different trades and must prove their skills, highlighting ingenuity and cooperation.
The Snow-queen
When a boy falls under the spell of an icy queen, his friend undertakes a perilous journey to rescue him through courage and devotion.
The Fir-tree
An ambitious fir-tree longs for grander days and discovers the cost of never savoring the present.
Hans, the Mermaid’s Son
A powerful youth born of the sea ventures into the human world, performing feats of strength and confronting trolls to claim his place.
Peter Bull
A poor lad and his extraordinary bull brave trolls and trials, using courage and craft to seek fortune and favor at court.
The Bird ‘Grip’
A young adventurer bargains with the mysterious bird Grip to steal treasures from a giant, triggering quests that test loyalty and wit.
Snowflake
A child fashioned from snow brings joy to a lonely couple but proves as fragile as the season that made her.
I Know What I Have Learned
A literal-minded fellow applies advice in all the wrong ways, with comic misadventures that teach him when rules don’t fit.
The Cunning Shoemaker
A clever cobbler outwits ogres and greedy nobles through disguises and tricks, turning poverty into prosperity.
The King Who Would Have a Beautiful Wife
A king’s obsession with beauty leads to a marriage grounded in deception and a reckoning with appearances versus truth.
Catherine and Her Destiny
Catherine meets her personified Destiny and endures hardship until she learns how to win its favor and change her fortune.
How the Hermit Helped to Win the King’s Daughter
With aid and counsel from a holy hermit, a humble youth completes impossible tasks to win a princess’s hand.
The Water of Life
Three brothers seek a magic water to cure their father; the youngest, aided by humble helpers, faces betrayal and a final test of truth.
The Wounded Lion
A compassionate man tends a wounded lion and later finds the grateful beast a powerful ally against danger and deceit.
The Man Without a Heart
A giant who hides his heart outside his body seems invincible until a hero discovers the secret and uses it to free the captives.
The Two Brothers
Separated siblings follow divergent paths marked by tokens of fate, animal helpers, and jealous rivals before their bond is tested.
Master and Pupil
A precocious student steals his master’s magic and engages in a high-stakes battle of transformations with deadly consequences.
The Golden Lion
A prince conceals himself inside a golden lion to approach a secluded princess, then must perform daunting tasks to win her.
The Sprig of Rosemary
When a girl awakens an enchanted beloved tied to a rosemary sprig, a broken taboo forces her into a long quest to find him again.
The White Dove
A young woman follows clues left by a prince enchanted as a dove, undertaking trials to break the spell and reunite.
The Troll’s Daughter
A youth bound to serve a troll survives impossible chores with the secret help of the troll’s daughter, setting both on a risky path to freedom.
Esben and the Witch
Small but shrewd Esben repeatedly steals from a fearsome witch and thwarts her traps to save his brothers and enrich the king.
Princess Minon-minette
A courtly French fairy tale in which a princess, beset by jealous fairies and strange enchantments, navigates ordeals to reach a fitting match.
Maiden Bright-eye
A virtuous maiden withstands a cruel stepfamily and magical perils, using courage and kindness to undo enchantments and find her fortune.
The Merry Wives
A cycle of comic episodes shows sharp-witted wives turning would-be tricksters’ schemes back on them.
King Lindorm
A serpent-born prince demands brides until a brave maiden confronts his enchantment with a perilous, transformative trial.
The Jackal, the Dove, and the Panther
Alliances between unlikely animals are tested by cunning and hunger, offering a fable about prudence and trust.
The Little Hare
A trickster hare uses speed and cleverness to outwit stronger beasts and escape danger.
The Sparrow with the Slit Tongue
After a kind old man befriends a sparrow, his greedy neighbor’s cruelty leads to a test of character and an unexpected reward and punishment.
The Story of Ciccu
Ciccu, a wily everyman, rises from nothing by deceiving ogres and solving riddles, eventually attempting to win a princess.
Don Giovanni De La Fortuna
A man born under the star of Fortune experiences wild swings of luck, learning how favor can be lost, bargained with, and regained.
