Brothers and Beasts: An Anthology of Men on Fairy Tales

Brothers and Beasts: An Anthology of Men on Fairy Tales. Edited by Kate Bernheimer. (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 2007. Pp. xx+191, table of contents, contributors, ISBN 0-8143-3267-6, pbk.) In the Introduction to Brothers and Beasts: An Anthology of Men on Fairy Tales, Kate Bernheimer describes her own experiences with fairy tales, telling how she sympathized first with brothers like Hansel and Blockhead because of an underlying affinity with the underdog. She draws on this affinity in describing the importance of fairy tales, as an underdog among narratives, and in noting that traditions of telling tales continue as long as people continue to return to them in their daily lives. This collection demonstrates just this transformative power of reading and telling fairy and folk tales in providing new insights that preserve traditions. As Maria Tatar writes in the Foreword, the excitement of this experience leads ... to transformative experience that recognizes the degree to which language--'strange words'--is the portal to knowledge and to an understanding of what really matters to us (xx). Both Bemheimer and Tatar provide strong context for the stories that follow; over the course of this anthology, each contributor demonstrates how and how strongly the words that constitute stories, most especially fairy and folk tales, change us, as readers and writers, and as adults and children. As an anthology that lies at the intersection of Creative Writing and Fairy Tale Studies, if not Folklore more generally, Brothers and Beasts grows out of the previous collection, Mirror, Mirror on the Wall: Women Writers Explore Their Favorite Fairy Tales, after men's voices were pushed out of the original anthology. However, Bernheimer notes the importance of these essays, poems, stories, and otherwise in working together to unsettle prejudices against men, fairy tales, and men's relationships with feminine tales. As result, though, the submission process for this collection posed more problems since male authors were more difficult to get to submit work, due to range of responses, from embarrassment at the fairy tale roots of their own work, to sense that the topic was either too big or too personal to put into words. Bernheimer thus highlights the importance of questioning such bias, although she directly states that this collection will not focus on gender and fairy tales. Instead, Brothers and Beasts provides space for men who love fairy tales to participate in a diverse dialogue about what fairy tales mean to our lives that does not provide easy answers about men and these tales, but instead demonstrates diversity of approaches. While the voices in this collection clearly do not provide easy answers for scholars, they do provide space for men to consider how they live with these tales. Further, the structure pushes the reader to include him or herself in this negotiation, as the chapters are arranged in alphabetical order, with the first few lines provided in the Table of Contents. The stated goal is that readers may pick up wherever they find their own interests lie and create structure all their own. While this collection tends toward an interest in writing, as demonstrated by Jirf Cech's rambling description of his father's rambling Czech tales, the reader provides the structure for the dialogue. …

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