Aurelia: Art and Literature Through the Mouth of the Fairy Tale

Description

In Aurelia, Mavor takes special interest in the fairy tale's gastronomy, including Alice's Wonderland cake marked EAT ME, the sugar of the witch's house in 'Hansel and Gretel' and the more disturbing ingestions of cannibalism, as in the Brothers Grimm's 'The Juniper Tree', where a murdered boy sings through the mouth of a bird: 'My mother she killed me. My father he ate me.' Moving beyond this, Mavor discovers the fairy-tale realm in more surprising places: the tragic candy-land poetry of the 1950s 'genius' child-poet Minou Drouet; the subterranean world of enchantment in the cave paintings of Lascaux; the brown fairies of African American poet Langston Hughes; and Miwa Yanagi's black-and-white, bloody photograph of the Grandmother and Little Red Riding Hood holding one another in the cut open belly of the wolf, as an allegory of the victims of Hiroshima. Through the lens of the fairy tale Mavor reads the world of literature and art as both magical and political.

Carol Mavor is Professor of Art History and Visual Culture at the University of Manchester. She has published widely on photography, cinema, colour and childhood. Her books include Blue Mythologies: Reflections on a Colour (Reaktion, 2013).

"Forget whatever you previously associated with 'fairy tales, ' and enter Carol Mavor's kaleidoscopic universe of art and literature. Everyone from Ralph Eugene Meatyard to Kiki Smith to Frank Baum to Emmett Till to Francesca Woodman to Langston Hughes is here, and so many more, held together by Mavor's casually erudite, finely spun web. Aurelia is as strange, enigmatic, and full of magic as its subjects."--Maggie Nelson, California Institute of the Arts