FAIRY TALES, ETC.
Bruno Bettelheim, The Uses of Enchantment: The Meaning and Importance of Fairy Tales (New York; Vintage Books, 1976, 2010) ("Today, as in past times, the most important and also the most difficult task in raising a child is helping him to find meaning in life. Many growth experiences are needed to achieve this. The child, as he develops, must learn step by step to understand himself better; with this he becomes more able to understand others, and eventually can relate to them in ways which are mutually satisfying and meaningful." "To find deeper meaning, one must become able to transcend the narrow confines of a self-centered existence and believe that one will make a significant contribution to life--if not right now, then at some future time. This feeling is necessary if a person is to be satisfied with himself and with what he is doing. In order not to be at the mercy of the vagaries of life, one must develop one's inner resources, so that one's emotions, imagination, and intellect mutually support and enrich one another. Our positive feelings give us the strength to develop our rationality; only hope for the future can sustain us in the adversities we unavoidably encounter. . . . " "We all tend to assess the future merits of an activity on the basis of what it offers now. But this is especially true for the child, who, much more than the adult, lives in the present and, although he has anxieties about the future, has only the vaguest notions of what it may require or be like. The idea that learning to read may enable one later to enrich one's life is experienced as an empty promise when the stories the child listens to or is reading at the moment, are caucus, The worst feature of these children's books is that they cheat the child of what he ought to gain from the experience of literature: access to deeper meaning, and that which is meaningful to him at his stage of development." Id. at 3-4.).
B. B. (aka Denys Watkins-Pitchfork), Down the Bright Stream, with illustrations by Denys Watkins-Pitchfork (London: Methuen/Eyre & Spottiswoode, 1948, 1969).
B. B. (aka Denys Watkins-Pitchfork), The Little Grey Men: A Story for the Young in Heart, introduction by Julie Andrews Edwards, with illustrations by Denys Watkins-Pitchfork (New York: The Julie Anrdews Collection/HarperCollins, 2004).
Leo Braudy, Haunted: On Ghost, Witches, Vampires, Zombies, and Other Monsters of the Natural and Supernatural Worlds (New Haven & London: Yale U. Press, 2016).
Scott G. Bruce, ed., The Penguin Book of the Undead: Fifteen Hundred Years of Supernatural Encounters (New York: Penguin Classics/Penguin Books, 2016).
Ray Russell, Haunted Castles: The Complete Gothic Stories, foreword by Guillermo Del Toro (New York: Penguin Classics/Penguin Press, 2013).
Jack Zipes, The Irresistible Fairy Tale: The Cultural and Social History of a Genre (Princeton & Oxford: Princeton U. Press, 2012) ("[D]uring the past forty years I have tried to forge a greater link with the social and natural sciences to explain the fairy tale's irresistible and inexplicable appeal. I have sought, in particular, to widen my own sociopolitical approach to folk and fairy tales, and have explored new developments in evolutionary psychology, cultural anthropology, biology, memetic, cognitive philosophy, and linguistics. For the most part, I have endeavored to demonstrate that the historical evolution of storytelling reflects struggles of human beings worldwide to adapt to their changing natural and social environments. The cultural evolution of the fairy tale is closely bound historically to all kinds of storytelling and different civilizing processes that have undergirded the formation of nation-states." Id. at xi.).
