The Enchanted Boot: Italian Fairy Tales and Their Tellers(The Donald Haase Fairy-Tale Studies)

A representative selection of tales from the Italian fairy-tale tradition, translated into English.

This comprehensive collection of Italian tales in English encourages a revisitation of the fairy-tale canon in light of some of the most fascinating material that has often been excluded from it. In the United States, we tend to associate fairy tales with children and are most familiar with the tales of the Brothers Grimm, Hans Christian Anderson, and Disney. But the first literary fairy tales appeared in Renaissance Italy, and long before the Grimms there was already a rich and sophisticated tradition that included hundreds of tales, including many of those today considered "classic." The authors featured in this volume have, over the centuries, explored and interrogated the intersections between elite and popular cultures and oral and literary narratives, just as they have investigated the ways in which fairy tales have been and continue to be rewritten as expressions of both collective identities and individual sensibilities. The fairy tale in its Italian incarnations provides a striking example of how this genre is a potent vehicle for expressing cultural aspirations and anxieties as well as for imagining different ways of narrating shared futures.

Nancy L. Canepa is associate professor of Italian at Dartmouth College. She is the editor of Teaching Fairy Tales (Wayne State University Press, 2019), translator of Giambattista Basile's The Tale of Tales, or Entertainment for Little Ones (Wayne State University Press, 2007), and author of Giambattista Basile's Lo cunto de li cunti and the Birth of the Literary Fairy Tale(Wayne State University Press, 1999).

The Enchanted Boot: Italian Fairy Tales & Their Tellers is an important and excellent anthology of Italian fairy tales. This ambitious collection fills a gap for fairy-tale enthusiasts and scholars who read English, offering a survey of Italian fairy-tale texts from the fifteenth through the twenty-first centuries.

Canepa's volume The Enchanted Boot: Italian Fairy Tales & Their Tellers is a welcome addition to the field of fairy- tale studies and to anglophone readers of fairy tales and Italian literature more generally. The book gives access to a wide variety of Italian tales, some of them translated here for the first time, spanning several centuries, regions, and styles. It should grace the bookshelves of scholars, teachers, students, and readers of the Italian fairy-tale tradition.

....praise for the author's vast knowledge of Italian literature and the fairy-tale tradition within it, and her excellent choice of representative texts. Every reader will discover some new fairy treasure here.

Thanks to The Enchanted Boot, English-speaking readers can now experience the Italian fairy tale's unique role in shaping Europe's literature of magic and wonder. Superb translations and expert commentary make Nancy Canepa's collection of Italian tales from the Middle Ages to the twenty-first century a monumental contribution to fairy-tale studies.