Jack Zipes, The Oxford Companion to Fairy Tales Book

EBook Description: From its ancient roots in the oral tradition to the postmodernist reworkings of the present day, the fairy tale has retained its powerful hold over the cultural imagination of Europe and North America. Now The Oxford Companion to Fairy Tales provides the first authoritative reference source for this complex, captivating genre.

From the Pulitzer Prize�winning journalist and bestselling author of Backlash�an unflinching dissection of the mind of America after 9/11. In this most original examination of America�s post-9/11 culture, Susan Faludi shines a light on the country�s psychological response to the attacks on that terrible day. Turning her acute observational powers on the media, popular culture, and political life, Faludi unearths a barely acknowledged but bedrock societal drama shot through with baffling contradictions. Why, she asks, did our culture respond to an assault against American global dominance with a frenzied summons to restore �traditional� manhood, marriage, and maternity? Why did we react as if the hijackers had targeted not a commercial and military edifice but the family home and nursery? Why did an attack fueled by hatred of Western emancipation lead us to a regressive fixation on Doris Day womanhood and John Wayne masculinity, with trembling �security moms,� swaggering presidential gunslingers, and the �rescue� of a female soldier cast as a �helpless little girl�?
The answer, Faludi finds, lies in a historical anomaly unique to the American experience: the nation that in recent memory has been least vulnerable to domestic attack was forged in traumatizing assaults by nonwhite �barbarians� on town and village. That humiliation lies concealed under a myth of cowboy bluster and feminine frailty, which is reanimated whenever threat and shame looms.

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