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Enchanted Hunters: The Power of Stories in Childhood by Maria Tatar

Source: www.guardian.co.uk

Nov 07, 2009

Summary

Children's books deserve this grown-up study. By AS Byatt

This is a risky and brilliant title. The Enchanted Hunters is the hotel where the predatory monster Humbert Humbert has his way with the nymphet Lolita. Maria Tatar is the author of the excellent Hard Facts of the Grimms' Fairy Tales as well as works on the Bluebeard story, Hans Andersen, and sexual murder in Weimar. Enchanted Hunters is not about classic fairytales but about authored children's writing, what children take and need from stories, and how this is not always what parents imagine.

Tatar begins with a wry analysis of how stories have the opposite effect from the desired one of making children drowsy and ready for sleep. She is splendidly contemptuous of books such as Disney's three-minute Bedtime Stories, Condensed Fairy Tales and even One-Minute Greek Myths. Good stories excite, delight and frighten. They are, as Tatar puts it, a solitary addiction, not necessarily teaching sociability or virtuous behaviour. Those of us who as children read late into the night under the bedclothes with torch

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