Summary
Fairy tales are supposed to be magical, surprising, and exhilarating, an enchanting counterpoint to everyday life that nonetheless helps us understand and deal with the anxieties of that life. Today, however, fairy tales are far from marvellous - in the hands of Hollywood, they have been stripped of their power, offering little but formulaic narratives and tame surprises. If we want to rediscover the power of fairy tales, as Armando Maggi thinks we should, we need to discover a new mythic lens, a new way of approaching and understanding, and thus re-creating, the transformative potential of these stories. Maggi argues that the first step is to understand the history of the various traditions of oral and written narrative that together created the fairy tales we know today.