{"id":544,"date":"2010-10-03T13:36:16","date_gmt":"2010-10-03T17:36:16","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blogs.law.harvard.edu\/tatar\/?p=544"},"modified":"2010-10-04T08:41:57","modified_gmt":"2010-10-04T12:41:57","slug":"picturing-fairy-tales","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/tatar\/2010\/10\/03\/picturing-fairy-tales\/","title":{"rendered":"Picturing Fairy Tales"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><a href=\"http:\/\/blogs.law.harvard.edu\/tatar\/files\/2010\/10\/snowwhite2.jpg\"><br \/>\n<\/a><\/p>\n<p><a href=\"http:\/\/blogs.law.harvard.edu\/tatar\/files\/2010\/10\/Dore_ridinghood.jpg\"><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"alignleft size-medium wp-image-557\" src=\"http:\/\/blogs.law.harvard.edu\/tatar\/files\/2010\/10\/Dore_ridinghood-233x300.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"233\" height=\"300\" srcset=\"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/tatar\/files\/2010\/10\/Dore_ridinghood-233x300.jpg 233w, https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/tatar\/files\/2010\/10\/Dore_ridinghood.jpg 747w\" sizes=\"auto, (max-width: 233px) 100vw, 233px\" \/><\/a><\/p>\n<p>Ellen Handler Spitz has a regular column on <em>The New Republic<\/em> website, where she has reviewed, among other volumes, Robie Harris&#8217;s <em>It&#8217;s Perfectly Normal<\/em>, Heinrich Hoffman&#8217;s <em>Struwwelpeter, <\/em>and David Wiesner&#8217;s <em>Three Pigs.<\/em> This week she has a review of <em>The Grimm Reader<\/em>, and she manages to capture the poetry of fairy tales with incandescent prose.\u00a0 I particularly liked her observations about how illustrations affect our reading of the tales.<\/p>\n<p>The Grimm Reader <em>also stimulates interpretation and improvisation  by eschewing illustrations.\u00a0In so doing, it provokes serious reflection  on the function of pictures in children\u2019s books. The dearth in this  text makes us weigh their role as enhancers or detractors. Arguments  against them of course claim that<\/em><em> they tend to fix a particular  visualization and tamp down what should be left loose and free. After  being exposed, say, to Gustave Dor\u00e9\u2019s haunting engravings of <\/em><em>Little Red Riding Hood,  it would be hard to imagine those scenes any other way. Here, by  contrast, words are given license to perform their sorcery unaided.  Pages are decorated only occasionally with delicate borders, medallions,  or illuminated letters. This pleases me immensely: in a culture  determined to flood itself with garish, sensational imagery to the  detriment of the unaided word, this book reminds us that, as Tatar  herself has written, the words of children\u2019s stor<\/em><em>ies are magic wands in  and of themselves<\/em>.<\/p>\n<p>http:\/\/www.tnr.com\/book\/review\/the-storytellers<\/p>\n<p><a href=\"http:\/\/blogs.law.harvard.edu\/tatar\/files\/2010\/10\/snowwhite4.jpg\"><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"aligncenter size-full wp-image-563\" src=\"http:\/\/blogs.law.harvard.edu\/tatar\/files\/2010\/10\/snowwhite4.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"250\" height=\"250\" srcset=\"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/tatar\/files\/2010\/10\/snowwhite4.jpg 250w, https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/tatar\/files\/2010\/10\/snowwhite4-150x150.jpg 150w\" sizes=\"auto, (max-width: 250px) 100vw, 250px\" \/><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Ellen Handler Spitz has a regular column on The New Republic website, where she has reviewed, among other volumes, Robie Harris&#8217;s It&#8217;s Perfectly Normal, Heinrich Hoffman&#8217;s Struwwelpeter, and David Wiesner&#8217;s Three Pigs. This week she has a review of The Grimm Reader, and she manages to capture the poetry of fairy tales with incandescent prose.\u00a0 [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2125,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-544","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/tatar\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/544","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/tatar\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/tatar\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/tatar\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2125"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/tatar\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=544"}],"version-history":[{"count":7,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/tatar\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/544\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":550,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/tatar\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/544\/revisions\/550"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/tatar\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=544"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/tatar\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=544"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/tatar\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=544"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}