Clever Gretchen And Other Forgotten Folktales

Sleeping beauties? Not Clever Gretchen or Kate Crackernuts or Manka or any of the other young heroines in this wonderful collection of folktales. Active, witty, brave, and resourceful, these girls and young women can fight and hunt, defeat giants, answer riddles and outwit the devil. These stories are usually left out of the popular collections of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, when women were supposed to be beautiful, innocent, and passive.

A retelling of traditional tales, with heroines who are not only beautiful but good, brave and clever.

Poor Hans marries the mayor's daughter after promising that in seven years he will go off with an evil dwarf unless he is able to pose a question the dwarf cannot answer.

Based on proven theory and real-life experience, this guidebook provides a one-stop resource for educators, librarians, and storytellers looking to introduce storytelling programs for young adults. Storytelling is often associated with storytime and library services to young children, but effective storytelling speaks to all ages—including teens. Engaging Teens with Story: How to Inspire and Educate Youth with Storytelling offers an in-depth look at storytelling for young adults that explains the benefits of storytelling with this audience, what current practices are, and storytelling opportunities to explore with youth. It provides a unique source of expert guidance that youth services librarians, professional storytellers, and middle and high school teachers will appreciate. Readers will learn how to find stories for teens, apply proven techniques for successful telling of tales to teens, use traditional literature as a basis for creative writing, and establish a teen storytelling club or troupe. The guide also covers how teens can create their own stories with digital media; the connections between traditional folk and fairy tales and today's film, television, books, and online media; and how storytelling can be successfully used with at-risk youth.

This Oxford companion provides an authoritative reference source for fairy tales, exploring the tales themselves, both ancient and modern, the writers who wrote and reworked them and related topics such as film, art, opera and even advertising.

For young listeners the folktale is a perfect gateway to the exciting worlds of culture and literature, and Del Negro’s book invites their engagement with proven techniques and original story scripts that can be used by experienced as well as beginning tellers.

What happens to traditional stories when they are retold in another time and cultural context and for a different audience? This first-of-its-kind study discusses Bible stories, classical myths, heroic legends, Arthurian romances, Robin Hood lore, folk tales, 'oriental' tales, and other stories derived from European cultures. One chapter is devoted to various retellings of classics, from Shakespeare to "Wind in the Willows." The authors offer a general theory of what motivates the retelling of stories, and how stories express the aspirations of a society. An important function of stories is to introduce children to a cultural heritage, and to transmit a body of shared allusions and experiences that expresses a society's central values and assumptions. However, the cultural heritage may be modified through a pervasive tendency of retellings to produce socially conservative outcomes because of ethnocentric, androcentric and class-based assumptions in the source stories that persist into retellings. Therefore, some stories, such as classical myths, are particularly resistant to feminist reinterpretations, for example, while other types, such as folktales, are more malleable. In examining such possibilities, the book evaluates the processes of interpretation apparent in retellings. Index included.

Do you remember when story time was magical, enchanted, and filled with wonder and amazement? Many psychologists and spiritual teachers have commented on the great value of revisiting folktales in our later years. Within this little book of tales, you may find favoritesfavorite stories, favorite characters, and better yet, favorite parts of yourself. A throng of magical characters, moving themes, and meaningful archetypesthey just naturally draw one in. A folktale character getting their groove on can be an irresistible thing. So-called childrens literature does not play second fiddle to other literature. In fact, it holds the very same powers. It transports us to different times and places and to different times and places within our own psyche. Partake, dear reader. Each story is a journey within.