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The Fairies Return: Or, New Tales for Old. Compiled by Peter Davies. Edited and with an Introduction by Maria Tatar. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2012. 372 pp.
It is no secret that literary, modernized retellings of fairy tales have been extremely popular for a long while. A significant part of the appeal of the largely unspecific fairy-tale form is its ability to transform itself and inspire retellings set anywhere at any time. Retelling these stories is not at all a new practice, however, as this latest entry into Jack Zipes's "Oddly Modem Fairy Tales" series clearly shows. The question of how one can "breathe new life into forms considered archaic, dated, passé, old-fashioned, or, worse yet, obsolete" (1) has attracted writers of all kinds over the years and was certainly the question put to several well-known British writers of the 1930s by this volume's compiler, Peter Davies.
The stories contained in The Fairies Return were written and are set in the early twentieth century, a fact that results in a delightfully different fairytale experience for the contemporary reader. Even those well versed in literary fairy-tale retellings will find something new and enchanting in this volume. A great deal of the charm of these tales comes from the fact that they are firmly rooted in their time, featuring 1930s slang, gramophones, stockbrokers, and pleasure cruises. It is easy to imagine them played out on screen in black and white.
The tales' emphasis on their particular...