From the Beast to the Blonde: On Fairy Tales and Their Tellers

I read this book back in high school when I was just starting to get interested in fairy tale analysis. It's very indepth, well-written, and enjoyable. It's easy to understand and straightforward but offers so much information you're bound to learn something new. I highly recommend From the Beast to the Blonde to anyone that loves fairy tales or mythology.

Marina Warner's _From the Beast to the Blonde_ is a wonderful and engaging work concerning the cultural history of fairy tales. Warner explores the "stock characters" and stories of traditional tales, and in the process creates an excellent work of scholarship and criticism in an area of literature that has been relegated to the nursery, but didn't start there.

If you love fairy tales and their backgrounds, buy this book. It's worth the read. Warner is an excellent author, and she makes a very good point regarding the role of women in the passing along of fairy tales to the next generation. This is a terrific book on fairy tales, and folklore in general.

Warner's text is huge, but thouroughly enjoyable, filled with cultural analises that range from obstetrics to hagiography and with equal respect for every approach between gynocriticism, materialism and psychoanalysis. The book is crammed with so much information and so many intersting details, that sometimes one wonders if these goodies are directly related to the topic, but the information is fascinating anyway, even when it does nothing to further her arguments. The first part concentrates on the tellers of fairy and wonder tales, who they were and under what conditions they told their tales. It also begins to explain the dual nature of fairy tales that will become the central issue of the second half of the book: how these tales, oral as well as literary, supported both subversive and consevative discourses, often within a single narrative. Potential readers should not presume that the only fairy tale studied is Beauty and the Beast, as the title seems to imply; many popular fairy tales have their own chapters devoted to them such as Donkeyskin, Bluebeard and The Little Mermaid. A few of the chapters, specifically the one on Angela Carter are a bit obscure, but the conclusion is brilliant, and the bibliography alone deserves special mention as an invaluable resource. The book is excellent for historians, folklorists, fairy/wonder tale scholars and feminists alike, but it will also enhance the enjoyment of those who read fairy tales only for pleasure.