Maria Tatar

Maria Tatar is the John L. Loeb Professor of Germanic Languages and Literatures at Harvard University. Her many books include Off with Their Heads! Fairy Tales and the Culture of Childhood and Lustmord: Sexual Murder in Weimar Germany (both Princeton). Murder, mutilation, cannibalism, infanticide, and incest: the darker side of classic fairy tales is the subject of this groundbreaking and intriguing study of Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm's Nursery and Household...

Maria Tatar is Professor of German at Harvard University. She is the author of Off with Their Heads! Fairy Tales and the Culture of Childhood, The Hard Facts of the Grimm's Fairy Tales, and Spellbound: Mesmerism and Literature, all published by Princeton University Press. In a book that confronts our society's obsession with sexual violence, Maria Tatar seeks the meaning behind one of the most disturbing images of twentieth-century Western culture:...

A treasury of dozens of African-American folktales discusses their role in a broader cultural heritage, sharing such classics as the Brer Rabbit stories, the African trickster Anansi, and tales from the late nineteenth-century's "Southern Workman."

"Nearly every culture tells the story of Beauty and the Beast in one fashion or another. From Cupid and Psyche to India's Snake Bride to South Africa's "Story of Five Heads," the partnering of beasts and beauties, of humans and animals in all their variety--cats, dogs, frogs, goats, lizards, bears, tortoises, monkeys, cranes, warthogs--has beguiled us for thousands of years, mapping the cultural contradictions that riddle every romantic relationship....