Marvelous Transformations: An Anthology of Fairy Tales and Contemporary Critical Perspectives ed. by Christine A. Jones and Jennifer Schacker (review)

Marvelous Transformations: An Anthology of Fairy Tales and Critical Perspectives. Edited by Christine A. Jones and Jennifer Schacker. Peterborough, Canada: Broadview Press, 2013. 580 pp.With Marvelous Transformations: An Anthology of Fairy Tales and Critical Perspectives, edited by Christine A. Jones and Jennifer Schacker, Broadview Press has made a rich addition to its line of fairytalerelated texts. This volume is unusual in a variety of fruitful ways and will be an excellent resource for graduate and undergraduate students as well as their professors. Marvelous Transformations is dedicated to guiding the reader to the genre of the fairy tale and its development as a whole, rather than to individual tale types. To that end, not only do the editors organize the included tales by era of composition or recording rather than by type, but they also include brief essays by prominent scholars highlighting different perspectives on key issues in contemporary studies instead of attempting to encapsulate the history of scholarship on fairy tales. Further, the online components of the book allow for an expanded table of contents. This is a volume well worth adding to any library, personal or institutional, with much to offer and only a few flaws.Whereas most scholarly compendiums of fairy tales organize their tales by theme or type, so that the reader can trace, for example, ATU 510A from Yeh-hsien to Angela Carter's Ashputtle, or, Mother's Ghost, Marvelous Transformations is less interested in tracing the development of any one tale type than it is in tracing the development of the genre itself. Thus Part I: Tales, is divided into five historical sections: Early Written Traditions, Early Print Traditions, Romanticism to the fin de siecle, Modem/Postmodem Tales, and Contemporary Transcriptions and Translations. Within each one of these sections, we are given a wide variety of tales from across Europe and the Mediterranean. This method of organization provides the reader, then, with the opportunity to read Giambattista Basile's Cinderella Cat (as the title is rendered here) in the context of three of his other tales, two of them much less well known, rather than as one of several versions of ATU 510A. Freed of the requirement that tales of the same type be juxtaposed, connections can also be more easily made among the tales of les precieuses, and there is room for some of the Norwegian tales of Peter Christian Asbjornsen and Jorgen Engebretsen Moe, with their bold and bawdy heroines. This decision allows the pan-European development of the genre and the spreading influence of, for example, the work of the Grimms in the nineteenth century, to be more easily grasped.This first part of the book contains several original translations, and the first two sections contain superb explanatory footnotes that add much to the reader's understanding, often by pointing out a linguistic subtlety not captured by the translation or by providing an important piece of cultural context. Unfortunately, those footnotes largely drop out of the text afterward and have disappeared by the time we reach the Grimms, so that there is nothing to indicate the various changes and editorial decisions that affect their Snow White or The Maiden Without Hands. Not even the Grimms' own notes on those tales are included, which deprives the reader of important information regarding the representation of gender and violence in these texts. There are a few other curious omissions, such as that of Yeh-hsien, the absence of which obscures the non-Western roots of the tale, and the absence of any tales by Oscar Wilde or Angela Carter. …

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