From wicked queens beautiful princesses elves monsters & goblins to giants glass slippers poisoned apples magic keys & mirrors the characters & images of fairy tales have cast a spell over readers & audiences both adults & children for centuries These fantastic stories have travelled across cultural borders & been passed on from generation to generation ever-changing renewed with each re-telling Few forms of literature have greater power to enchant us & rekindle our imagination than a fairy tale But what is a fairy tale? Where do they come from & what do they mean? What do they try & communicate to us about morality sexuality & society? The range of fairy tales stretches across great distances & time; their history is entangled with folklore & myth & their inspiration draws on ideas about nature & the supernatural imagination & fantasy psychoanalysis & feminism Marina Warner has loved fairy tales over a long writing life & she explores here a multitude of tales through the ages their different manifestations on the page the stage & the screen From the phenomenal rise of Victorian & Edwardian literature to contemporary children's stories Warner unfolds a glittering array of examples from classics such as Red Riding Hood Cinderella & The Sleeping Beauty the Grimm Brothers' Hansel & Gretel & Hans Andersen's The Little Mermaid to modern-day realizations including Walt Disney's Snow White & gothic interpretations such as Pan's Labyrinth In ten succinct chapters Marina Warner digs into a rich hoard of fairy tales in their brilliant & fantastical variations in order to define a genre & evaluate a literary form that keeps shifting through time & history Her book makes a persuasive case for fairy tale as a crucial repository of human understanding & culture