Best Selling Books by Marina Warner

Shows how the figure of Mary has shaped and been shaped by changing social and historical circumstances and why for all their beauty and power,the legends of Mary have condemned real women to perpetual inferiority.

With over thirty illustrations in color and black and white, Phantasmagoria takes readers on an intellectually exhilarating tour of ideas of spirit and soul in the modern world, illuminating key questions of imagination and cognition. Warner tells the unexpected and often disturbing story about shifts in thought about consciousness and the individual person, from the first public waxworks portraits at the end of the eighteenth century to stories of hauntings, possession, and loss of self in modern times. She probes the perceived distinctions between fantasy and deception, and uncovers a host of spirit forms--angels, ghosts, fairies, revenants, and zombies--that are still actively present in contemporary culture.

A brilliant examination of the allegorical uses of the female form to be found in the sculpture ornamenting public buildings as well as throughout the history of western art.

Our foremost theorist of myth, fairytales, and folktales explores the magical realm of the imagination where carpets fly, objects speak, dreams reveal hidden truths, and genies grant prophetic wishes. Stranger Magic examines the wondrous tales of the Arabian Nights, their profound impact on the West, and the progressive exoticization of magic since the eighteenth century, when the first European translations appeared. The Nights seized European readers’ imaginations during the siècle des Lumières, inspiring imitations, spoofs, turqueries, extravaganzas, pantomimes, and mauresque tastes in dress and furniture. Writers from Voltaire to Goethe to Borges, filmmakers from Raoul Walsh on, and countless authors of children’s books have adapted its stories. What gives these tales their enduring power to bring pleasure to readers and audiences? Their appeal, Marina Warner suggests, lies in how the stories’ magic stimulates the creative activity of the imagination. Their popularity during the Enlightenment was no accident: dreams, projections, and fantasies are essential to making the leap beyond the frontiers of accepted knowledge into new scientific and literary spheres. The magical tradition, so long disavowed by Western rationality, underlies modernity’s most characteristic developments, including the charmed states of brand-name luxury goods, paper money, and psychoanalytic dream interpretation. In Warner’s hands, the Nights reveal the underappreciated cultural exchanges between East and West, Islam and Christianity, and cast light on the magical underpinnings of contemporary experience, where mythical principles, as distinct from religious belief, enjoy growing acceptance. These tales meet the need for enchantment, in the safe guise of oriental costume.

From wicked queens, beautiful princesses, elves, monsters, and goblins, to giants, glass slippers, poisoned apples, magic keys, and mirrors, the characters and images of fairy tales have cast a spell over readers and audiences, both adults and children, for centuries. These fantastic stories have travelled across cultural borders, and been passed on from generation to generation, ever-changing, renewed with each re-telling. Few forms of literature have greater power to enchant us and rekindle our imagination than a fairy tale. But what is a fairy tale? Where do they come from and what do they mean? What do they try and communicate to us about morality, sexuality, and society? The range of fairy tales stretches across great distances and time; their history is entangled with folklore and myth, and their inspiration draws on ideas about nature and the supernatural, imagination and fantasy, psychoanalysis, and feminism. In this Very Short Introduction, Marina Warner digs into a rich hoard of fairy tales in all their brilliant and fantastical variations, in order to define a genre and evaluate a literary form that keeps shifting through time and history. Drawing on a glittering array of examples, from classics such as Red Riding Hood, Cinderella, and The Sleeping Beauty, the Grimm Brothers'' Hansel and Gretel, and Hans Andersen''s The Little Mermaid, to modern-day realizations including Walt Disney''s Snow White, Warner forms a persuasive case for fairy tale as a crucial repository of human understanding and culture. ABOUT THE SERIES: The Very Short Introductions series from Oxford University Press contains hundreds of titles in almost every subject area. These pocket-sized books are the perfect way to get ahead in a new subject quickly. Our expert authors combine facts, analysis, perspective, new ideas, and enthusiasm to make interesting and challenging topics highly readable.

Examines the life of Joan of Arc and explores the meaning of Joan both to her contemporaries and succeeding generations--Joan as hero, prophet, heretic, androgyne, harlot, and saint.

"Marina Warner explores the development of the modern nursery classics, using a wide range of sources, literary and artistic, historic and anthropological, to unfold neglected aspects of the tradition. [...] The author finds surprising sides to a flourishing folklore about storytelling and women''s tongues, about the power of the disregarded to press their point of view in spite of everything"--

From wicked queens, beautiful princesses, elves, monsters, and goblins to giants, glass slippers, poisoned apples, magic keys, and mirrors, the characters and images of fairy tales have cast a spell over readers and audiences, both adults and children, for centuries. These fantastic stories have travelled across cultural borders, and been passed on from generation to generation, ever-changing, renewed with each re-telling. Few forms of literature have greater power to enchant us and rekindle our imagination than a fairy tale. But what is a fairy tale? Where do they come from and what do they mean? What do they try and communicate to us about morality, sexuality, and society? The range of fairy tales stretches across great distances and time; their history is entangled with folklore and myth, and their inspiration draws on ideas about nature and the supernatural, imagination and fantasy, psychoanalysis, and feminism. Marina Warner has loved fairy tales over a long writing life, and she explores here a multitude of tales through the ages, their different manifestations on the page, the stage, and the screen. From the phenomenal rise of Victorian and Edwardian literature to contemporary children''s stories, Warner unfolds a glittering array of examples, from classics such as Red Riding Hood, Cinderella, and The Sleeping Beauty, the Grimm Brothers'' Hansel and Gretel, and Hans Andersen''s The Little Mermaid, to modern-day realizations including Walt Disney''s Snow White and gothic interpretations such as Pan''s Labyrinth. In ten succinct chapters, Marina Warner digs into a rich hoard of fairy tales in their brilliant and fantastical variations, in order to define a genre and evaluate a literary form that keeps shifting through time and history. Her book makes a persuasive case for fairy tale as a crucial repository of human understanding and culture.

From a highly original and profound commentator on the culture of the past and present comes this superb 25-year retrospective collection of her finest essays on fiction, drama, religion and fairy-tale.

The story of a family, bringing to life the forgotten heart of Italy, the Mezzogiorno, weakened by emigration, silenced by fascism. This is the imaginary memoir of an Italian family, from 1909 to the 1930s, with a framework in the present day. The narrator is drawn into the passion and prejudice of her own invention, and we see how memory, like folk memory distorts and mythologizes.

Published to accompany the exhibition at Tate Modern 12 May - 17 December 2000.

Marina Warner has gathered together a magical collection of fairy tales by the great women storytellers of the 17th and 18th centuries. These are passionate, extraordinary, and occasionally proto-feminist retellings of classic fairy stories by women who ingeniously used the fairy tale genre to comment on their own times and experiences. The stories are all in superb new translations by celebrated writers, including A. S. Byatt, Gilbert Adair and John Ashbery. With a brilliant intorduction by Marina Warner, recognised as one of our greatest experts on myth and fairy tale.

L''Atalante is the work of French director Jean Vigo. It is a study of romantic love, told in a style influenced by surrealism, but still Vigo''s own. This text is part of the ''BFI Film Classics'' series. Each volume in the series presents a personal commentary on the film, together with a brief production history and a detailed filmography, notes and bibliography.

This collection of images capture sculptor David Nash''s intimate exploration of the properties of trees and timber. The accompanying essay by Marina Warner explores Nash''s influences, approach and the mythical status of trees throughout history.

Is Jurassic Park a work of covert misogynist propaganda? Does romanticizing childhood lead to abusing children? What secret correspondence links Mary Shelley''s Frankenstein to video games and Shakespeare''s Caliban to Hannibal Lecter? in what ways do our culture''s most hallowed legends inform the current debates over single mothers, the men''s movement, and animal rights? In these six dazzlingly intelligent and provocative essays, the distinguished English novelist and critic Marina Warner weaves classical mythology, pop culture, and today''s headlines into a potent work of cultural criticism that is both unsettling and entertaining. Ranging from Medeato Thelma and Louise and from myths of cannibalism to the politics of rape, Six Myths of Our Time is at once a celebration of the enduring power of fable and a welcome antidote to its more virulent manifestations in our public life.

A story full of myth, mystery and great imaginative power about a young woman who searching for her lost baby son, like Mother Courage, appears in different guises across different centuries and cultures. She is the eternal refugee but ultimately, the survivor.