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Preserving the Spell: Basile’s The Tale of Tales and Its Afterlife in the Fairy-tale tradition

presented by Prof. Armando Maggi

(University of Chicago Press, 2015)

Preserving the Spell: Basile’s The Tale of Tales and Its Afterlife in the Fairy-tale tradition(University of Chicago Press, 2015) by Prof. Armando Maggi  Thursday, February 11th at 6pm at the Italian Cultural Institute  Preserving the Spell: Basile’s The Tale of Tales and Its Afterlife in the Fairy-tale tradition (2015) details the tradition of magic tales in Western culture. Prof. Maggio believes that storytelling requires a new form of magic, a new enchantment. If we want to rediscover the power of fairy tales, we need to discover a new mythic lens, a new way of approaching and thus recreating the transformative potential of these stories. Prof. Maggi holds that the first step is to understand the history of the various traditions of oral and written narratives that together created the fairy tales we know today. Prof. Maggi’s book begins with Giovambattista Basile’s Neapolitan collection of magic tales, Lo cunto de li cunti, the first book of fairy tales of the Western tradition with the first Cinderella and Sleeping Beauty, for example, and then goes backwards to the myths and stories of antiquity, and then shows how German Romanticism and American Post-modernism appropriated the original Italian stories. In the appendix, Prof. Maggi offers the first translation of the Brothers Grimm’s adaptations of the Basile’s fairy tales. Prof. Maggi has translated these stories for the first time from German into English, with several footnotes explaining the differences between the Italian and German versions.”Presented in collaboration with the University of Chicago Press. Copies of the book will be available for sale.  Armando Maggi is Professor in the Department of Romance Languages and Literatures at the University of Chicago, where he also served on the Committee on History of Culture. He has published volumes on early modern culture, among others Satan’s Rhetoric: A Study of Renaissance Demonology (2001) and In the Company of Demons, (2006); and on female mysticism (Maria Maddalena de’ Pazzi: Selected Revelations, 2001). He has published more than seventy essays on Renaissance philosophy, Christian mysticism, love treatises, and baroque culture. In the field of modern literature, he has published a book on Pier Paolo Pasolini titled The Resurrection of the Body: Pasolini From Saint Paul to Sade (2009), and essays on Pasolini’s theater, and most recently an essay on D’Annunzio’s Notturno and Pasolini’s unfinished novel Petrolio.  Most of his books were published by the University of Chicago Press.

This event is free and open to the public.RSVP at http://taleoftales.eventbrite.com

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