Christine Jones and Jennifer Schacker have created an unusual and fascinating anthology dedicated to the study of folklore and fairy tales. Instead of collecting a variety of tales from a particular country or from different parts of the world, they have assembled international texts chronologically, from earlier written traditions to contemporary transcriptions and translations. They have also included brief commentaries ... Read moreand essays on important topics. Their aim is to foster an interdisciplinary and historical approach to understanding the complex evolution of a genre, and it is to their great credit that they have produced a most original book that will be useful to readers who seek to grasp the mysterious changes that fairy tales have undergone ever since once upon a time. - Jack Zipes, Professor Emeritus, University of Minnesota We may think we know what fairy tales are and what they mean, but the stories and critical essays collected by Christine Jones and Jennifer Schacker succeed in making the seemingly familiar decidedly unfamiliar. Marvelous Transformations invites readers to discover fairy tales both well known and neglected and, at the end of the volume, a series of short essays that bring together the best of current literary and folkloric approaches to the genre. Students, teachers, scholars-indeed, all readers interested in fairy tales-have much to learn from this volume. - Lewis Seifert, Brown University This volume's strength lies in both its range of primary source stories and the span of secondary criticism included. With their selection of texts, Jones and Schacker have also attempted to situate fairy tale studies in a broader interdisciplinary context that emphasizes the relationship between literary history and folklore history, particularly field-based oral storytelling. -Johanna Denzin, Columbia College Show Less