University Press Copublishing Division / John Cabot University Press
Pages: 218
Trim: 6 x 9
978-1-61149-380-1 • Paperback • March 2012 • $53.99 • (£42.00)
978-1-61149-379-5 • eBook • March 2012 • $51.00 • (£39.00)
Vito Carrassi is a writer and translator who teaches folklore at the University of Bari. His main fields of research are literary anthropology, narratology, Irish and Italian folklore.
CONTENTS
AcknowledgmentsIntroduction1. Narrativity, between Orality and Writing
2.The Fairy tale: Reformulation of a Concept
Notes
Chapter 1. A Celtic Legacy and Christian Syncretism1. A Methodological Introduction2. The Celtic Heredity
3. The Christian Appropriation of Celtic Tradition
Notes
Chapter 2. The Precursors of Yeats in the Recuperation of the Narrative Tradition1. TheRoyal Hibernian Tales
2. Thomas Crofton Croker and His Followers
3. Patrick Kennedy
4. Letitia McClintock, Lady Wilde, Douglas Hyde
5. The Literary Reception of the Written Gaelic Tradition
Notes
Chapter 3. A Rebirth in the Light of the Tradition
1. The National Question and Literary Rebirth2. Yeats, the Inspiration of the Irish Revival
3. The Distinguishing Characteristics of Yeats’ Collections
4. The Fairy Tale according to Stephens
Notes,
Chapter 4. The Fairy Talebetween fabula and historia
1. The Space-Time Coordinates of the Fairy Tale
2. The Dynamic Established by the Fairy Tale
Notes
Chapter 5. The Process of Composition of the Fairy Tale
1. The Triangle Composed ofEtain, Midir and Eochaid and the Origin of the Fairy Tale
2. An Analysis of the Priomscel and the Structure of the Fairy Tale
3. Classification of the Functions and Characterization of the Fairy Tale
Notes
Chapter 6. Plurality and Metanarrative in the Fairy Tale
1. Substructure and Metastructure
2. Deep Structure and Surface Structure
3. The Narrativity Produced by the Fairy Tale
Notes
Chapter 7. The Significance of the Fairy Tale in the Historical and Cultural Context
1. An Indicative Metaphor
2. The Epiphanic and Pragmatic Components of the Fairy Tale
3. The Dialectic between Signifier and Signified
Notes
Chapter 8. Between the Fairy Taleand Tale
1. The Five Phases of the Fairy Tale
2. The Fairy Tale and the Pseudo-Fairy Tale
3. The Joycian Tale in the Light of the Fairy Tale
Notes
Chapter 9. Narrative Construction and Re-Construction of the World
1. Paradigm and Syntagma, Fabula and Plot
2. An Essential Dialectic
Notes
Chapter 10. Beyond Ireland: a General Perspective1. Narrativity as a Quest for Meaning
2. A Model of Universal Significance
Notes
Select Bibliography
Carrassi (University of Bari, Italy) contributes to the ever-burgeoning field of fairy tale studies with a densely packed volume that reveals various influences, including narratology, structuralism, archetypal criticism, and Catholicism. His focus is the fairy tale in Ireland from the Celtic period through the Irish Revival to James Joyce. But Carrassi's goal is to go beyond the regional and interrogate and then redefine the fairy tale genre itself. His aim, he writes, ‘is to analyze the relationships that, in a determined space-time context, have been created between two opposed ambits of the narrative tradition ... the oral and popular components and the written and cultured.’ Relying heavily on the foundational works of the field (by, for example, Max Lüthi, Vladimir Propp, Stith Thompson, and Tzvetan Todorov), Carrassi shuns more recent approaches, such as feminist and Marxist analyses. Focusing on what he terms the ‘narrative patrimony’ of Ireland and the ‘congenital narrativity’ of the Irish people, he hypothesizes about the process of composition, the meta-narrativity, and the meanings of the traditional tales. Summing Up: Recommended.
— Choice Reviews