The Irish Fairy Tale

A Narrative Tradition from the Middle Ages to Yeats and Stephens

By (author) Vito Carrassi Translated by Kevin Wren

Paperback - £42.00

Publication date:

15 March 2012

Length of book:

218 pages

Publisher

John Cabot University Press

Dimensions:

230x154mm
6x9"

ISBN-13: 9781611493801

Beginning with a critical reappraisal of the notion of “fairy tale” and extending it to include categories and genres which are in common usage in folklore and in literary studies, this book throws light on the general processes involved in storytelling. It illuminates the fundamental ways in which a culture is formed, while highlighting important features of the Irish narrative tradition, in all its wealth and variety and in its connections with the mythical and historical events of Ireland. The Irish Fairy Tale argues that the fairy tale is a kind of “neutral zone,” a place of transition as well as a meeting place for popular beliefs and individual creativity, oral tradition and literary works, historical sources and imaginary reconstructions, and for contrasting and converging views of the world, which altogether allow for a deeper and more sophisticated understanding of reality. The book focuses on stories by Yeats and Stephens, whose approach to the subject marks the culmination of a long tradition of attempts at linking past and present and of bridging the gap between what appear to be contradictory facets of a single culture. This leads to a comparative study of Joyce’s Dubliners, which illustrates the universal and exemplary nature of the notion of fairy tale put forward in the work.

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.