Translations of the forewords and afterwords by original fairy tale authors and commentaries by their contemporaries, material that has not been widely published in English.

The writers and collectors of tales used traditional forms and genres in order to shape children's lives - their behavior, values, and relationship to society. As Jack Zipes convincingly shows, fairy tales have always been a powerful discourse, capable of being used to shape or destabilize attitudes and behavior within culture.

The Tale of Tales evokes marvelous worlds of fairy-tale unreality as well as the everyday rituals of life in seventeenth-century Naples. Originally written in the nonstandard Neopolitan dialect of Italian, this important piece of Baroque literature has long been inaccessible to both the general public and most fairy-tale scholars. This is a modern translation that preserves the distinctive character of Basile's original.

Cupid and Psyche starts around page 88 in book 4, and continues into Book 5 of this compilation.

Drawing on cognitive science, evolutionary theory, anthropology, psychology, literary theory, and other fields, fairy-tale expert Jack Zipes presents a provocative new theory about why fairy tales were created and retold--and why they became such an indelible and infinitely adaptable part of cultures around the world.

This volume brings together scholars who have contributed to the field of fairy-tale studies since its origins, including information on materials, critical approaches and ideas, and pedagogical resources for the teaching of fairy tales in one comprehensive source that will further help bring fairy-tale studies into the academic mainstream.

From Court to Forest is a critical and historical study of the beginnings of the modern literary fairy tale. Giambattista Basile's Lo cunto de Ii cunti written in Neapolitan dialect and published in 1634-36, comprises fifty fairy tales and was the first integral collection of literary fairy tales to appear in Western Europe. It contains some of the best known fairy-tales types, such as Sleeping Beauty, Puss in Boots, Cinderella, and others, many in their earliest versions. Although it became a central reference point for subsequent fairy tale writers, such as Perrault and the Grimms, as well as a treasure chest for folklorists, Lo cunto de Ii cunti has had relatively little attention devoted to it by literary scholars. Lo cunto constituted a culmination of the erudite interest in popular culture and folk traditions that permeated the Renaissance. But even if Basile drew from the oral tradition, he did not merely transcribe the popular materials he heard and gathered around Naples and in his travels. He transformed them into original tales distinguished by vertiginous rhetorical play, abundant representations of the rituals of everyday life and the popular culture of the time, and a subtext of playful critique of courtly culture and the canonical literary tradition. This work fills a gap in fairy-tale and Italian literary studies through its rediscovery of one of the most important authors of the Italian Baroque and the genre of the literary fairy tale.

Covering over 300 years, this volume of essays articulates the literary, ideological and historical contexts in which fairy tales evolved in Italy and France. The tales analyzed were each appropriated from oral tradition by professional men and women of letters and thus reveal a cultural history.