Overview

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'shouse in 'Hansel and Gretel' and the more disturbing ingestions of cannibalism,as in the Brothers Grimm's 'The Juniper Tree', where a murderedboy sings through the mouth of a bird: 'My mother she killed me. Myfather he ate me.'Moving beyond this, Mavor discovers the fairy-tale realm in more surprisingplaces: the tragic candy-land poetry of the 1950s 'genius' child-poetMinou Drouet; the subterranean world of enchantment in the cave paintingsof Lascaux; the brown fairies of African American poet LangstonHughes; and Miwa Yanagi's black-and-white, bloody photograph of theGrandmother and Little Red Riding Hood holding one another in the cutopen belly of the wolf, as an allegory of the victims of Hiroshima. Throughthe lens of the fairy tale Mavor reads the world of literature and art as bothmagical and political.

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9781780237176

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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. <i>Aurelia</i> is as strange, enigmatic, and full of magic as its subjects. --Maggie Nelson, California Institute of the Arts

Author Information

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).

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