cover art by Matt Saunders

“…its no surprise
If the wolf takes many a prize.
I say the wolf because not all wolves are the same.
There are those of courteous fame,
No noise or bile or rage,
But reserved, compliant, and sage,
Who will trail a girl well bred
All the way home, into her bed.
Ah! But as everyone knows, it’s the saccharine tongues,
Of all the wolves, who are the most dangerous ones.”
— Charles Perrault, “The Little Red Tippet”
—- translation by Christine Jones

Mother Goose Refigured: A Critical Translation of Charles Perrault’s Fairy Tales
Christine A. Jones
Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 2016

University of Utah Associate Professor Christine Jones is a specialist of seventeenth- and eighteenth-century France, with interests in the luxury trades and the fairy tale. She is the author of Shapely Bodies: The image of Porcelain in Eighteenth-Century France, as well as numerous articles on trade history. With folklore scholar Jennifer Schacker, she coedited Marvelous Transformations: An Anthology of Fairy Tales and Contemporary Critical Perspectives and Feathers, Paws, Fins, and Claws: Fairy-Tale Beasts.

Her work as a scholar and a teacher has been recognized with numerous honors and awards, including The University Distinguished Teaching Award (2014) and the Honors-Humanities Professorship (2015). For the Honors-Humanities Professorship Lecture she spoke to a packed house about “When Chocolate was Magic and Medicine.” She has introduced numerous undergraduate and graduate students to the enchantment of working with rare books and Rare Books.

We celebrate the publication of Christine’s latest book with an invitation to hold some of the rare magic for yourself by visiting Special Collections.

Tales of Mother Goose: the dedication manuscript of 1695 reproduced in collotype facsimile, Pierpont Morgan Library, 1956
Z115Z P43

“Cinderella is not a singular but plural, not a stable identity but a constantly shifting one. She is made of so many different versions of identity layered up in printed, oral, and visual media that she might be called a ‘palimpsest.'” — from the Introduction, Mother Goose Revisited

Possible Squeeze Play. This Advice I chanced Upon, That’s Influenced Me Quite a Lot — “If the shoe fits–put it on!” Just Look What Cinderella Got!, Kathryn Kay, Circle Publishing Co., 1941 PS3521 A88 P677 1941

“Dressing the part so that people take you seriously as a way to draw attention to yourself when you would otherwise go unnoticed…sounds logical.” — from the Introduction, Mother Goose Refigured

A FAIRY GARLAND, BEING FAIRY TALES…
Edmund Dulac,
Cassel & Company, 1928
PZ8 F1685 1928

“Even a wit of the dimmest cast,
Who is not so very worldly,
Will discover anon that this story
Is a tale of times long past.
No more the horrible husband of old
Whose demands were impossibly bold.
Though now he be discontent and domineering
Still with his wife he’s endearing.
The color of his beard no longer stands
To show among them who wears the pants.”
—Charles Perrault, “The Blue Beard”
—-translation by Christine Jones

L’Oeuvre de Leon Bakst pour La belle au bois dormant, M. de Brunhoff, 1922
ND699 B3 L38

“While she was crossing the woods, she ran into the neighborhood wolf, who very much wanted to eat her but did not dare because of the woodsmen in the forest. He asked her where she was going. The poor girl, who did not know that it is dangerous to stop and listen to wolves, told him…”
—Charles Perrault, “Little Red Tippet”
—-translation by Christine Jones

Little Red Riding Hood, animated by Julian Wehr, Dunewald Printing Corporation, 1944
PZ8 L783 We