released 11/30/2018

With characters that include a Dark Lady, a Green Lady, a Silver Lady, a Golden King, and a spoiled princess, Anna Maria Mendell’s book-length fairy story, The Golden Princess and the Moon (2016), is a re-telling of the story of Sleeping Beauty. In this Friday Feature, Mendell talks with Ken Myers about how fairy stories can use the device of magic to call attention to the real nature of things. 

13 minutes

PREVIEW

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Theologian Vigen Guroian has been writing and lecturing for many years about how fairy tales form the moral imagination of children (and, sometimes, of grown-ups). His 1998 book, Tending the Heart of Virtue: How Classic Stories Awaken a Child‘s Moral Imagination, has just been reissued in an expanded second edition by Oxford University Press. An interview with him about this book will be presented on Volume 158 of the Journal. Meanwhile, today’s Feature presents a reading of an article by Guroian originally published in 2020 in Touchstone: “The Fairy Tale Wars: Lewis, Chesterton, at al. against the Frauds, Experts, and Revisionists.” In the article, Guroian critiques (with help from Charles Dickens, John Ruskin, C. S. Lewis, and G. K. Chesterton) the common practice of retelling traditional stories in ways that eliminate the meaning of the originals.

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