PERHAPS A GIFT VOUCHER FOR MUM?: MOTHER'S DAY
Maria Tatar is Dean for the Humanities in the Faculty of Arts and Sciences and the John L. Loeb Professor of Germanic Languages and Literatures at Harvard University. She is the author of The Hard Facts of the Grimms' Fairy Tales, Off with Their Heads! Fairy Tales and the Culture of Childhood ; and Lustmord: Sexual Murder in Weimar Germany (all Princeton).
In this fine book, which both scholars and ordinary readers enjoy, as I did, [Tatar] casts her net wide. She reprints several versions of 'Bluebeard,' and discusses not only these tales and their many variants, but also the reappearance of the story in fiction, film, opera, and poetry. -- Alison Lurie, The American Scholar A respected critic of fairy tales, Tatar takes on Bluebeard and the result is a deeply resonant, fascinating study of intertextuality... [S]he persuasively demonstrates how the Bluebeard tale shifts its shape century by century, revealing the secret anxieties of the age regarding sexuality, coming of age, romance, marriage, and marital discord. -- Choice Secrets beyond the Door is full of transmutations and sublimations. Harvard professor Maria Tatar ... returns with a scintillating account of what generations of high and low culture have done to the Bluebeard folktale. -- John Leonard, Harper's A book that unlocks the reasons of transgression in the chambers of the mind. -- Alex Moore, Foreword Magazine
