2016年12月25日 星期日

The Wonderful Wizard of Oz      

The Wonderful Wizard of Oz       (week 15)


The Wonderful Wizard of Oz is an American children's novel written by author L. Frank Baum and illustrated by W. W. Denslow, originally published by the George M. Hill Company in Chicago on May 17, 1900.The novel is one of the best-known stories in American literature and has been widely translated.


The story chronicles the adventures of a young farm girl named Dorothy in the magical Land of Oz, after she and her pet dog Toto are swept away from their Kansas home by a cyclone.

The Wonderful Wizard of Oz is considered the first American fairy tale because of its references to clear American locations such as Kansas and Omaha. Baum agreed with authors such as Carroll that fantasy literature was important for children, along with numerous illustrations, but he also wanted to create a story that had recognizable American elements in it, such as farming and industrialization.

Another influence lay in Lewis Carroll's Alice's Adventures in Wonderland. A September 1900 review in the Grand Rapids Herald called The Wonderful Wizard of Oz a "veritable Alice in Wonderland brought up to the present day standard of juvenile literature".Baum found Carroll's plots incoherent, but he identified the books' source of popularity as Alice herself, a child with whom the child readers could identify; this influenced his choice of a protagonist.Baum was also influenced by Carroll's belief that children's books should have many pictures and bemorals, instead believing that children should be allowed to be children. Building on Carroll's style of numerous images accompanying the text, Baum amalgamated the conventional features of a fairy tale (witches and wizards) with the well-known things in his readers' lives .
pleasurable to read. Carroll rejected the Victorian-era ideology that children's books should be saturated with .

Over the Rainbow
Over the Rainbow" (often referred to as "Somewhere over the Rainbow") is a ballad, with music
by Harold Arlen and lyrics by E.Y. Harburg.It was written for the movie The Wizard of Oz (1939) and was sung by actress Judy Garland, in her starring role as Dorothy Gale. The song won the Academy Award for Best Original Song and became Garland's signature song, as well as one of the most enduring standards of the 20th century.
The "Over the Rainbow" sequence and the entirety of the Kansas scenes were directed by King Vidor, though he was not credited. The song was initially deleted from the film after a preview in San Luis Obispo.







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2016年12月22日 星期四

Hans Christian Andersen

Hans Christian Andersen    （week 14）
H. C. Andersen （April 1805 – 4 August 1875) was a Danish author. Although a prolific writer of plays, travelogues, novels, and poems, Andersen is best remembered for his fairy tales. Andersen's popularity is not limited to children; his stories, called eventyr in Danish,
express themes that transcend age and nationality.

Some of his most famous fairy tales include "The Emperor's New Clothes", "The Little Mermaid", "The Nightingale", "The Snow Queen", "The Ugly Duckling", "Thumbelina".




In the spring of 1872, Andersen got off on the wrong side of the bed. He fell out of his bed and was severely hurt; he never recovered. Soon afterward, he started to show signs of liver cancer.

At the time of his death, Andersen was internationally revered, and the Danish Government paid him an annual stipend as a "national treasure".














                          statue of little mermaid ↓




















movies:
Hans Christian Andersen   

little mermaid

snow queen

The Emperor's New Clothes

The Nightingale

Thumbelina

The Ugly Duckling





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2016年12月13日 星期二

Brothers Grimm

Brothers Grimm              (week  thirteen)

The Brothers Grimm, Jacob (1785–1863) and Wilhelm Grimm (1786–1859), were German
academics, philologists, cultural researchers, lexicographers and authors who together specialized in collecting and publishing folklore during the 19th century. They were among the best-known storytellers of folk tales, and popularized stories such as "Cinderella" , "The Frog Prince", "Rapunzel", Sleeping Beauty" , and "Snow White" . Their first collection of folk tales, Children's and Household Tales , was published in 1812.
In addition to writing and modifying folk tales, the brothers wrote collections of well-respected German and Scandinavian mythologies, and in 1838 they began writing a definitive German dictionary (Deutsches Wörterbuch), which they were unable to finish during their lifetimes.

The tales are available in more than 100 languages and have been later adapted by filmmakers including Lotte Reiniger and Walt Disney, with films such as Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs and Sleeping Beauty. During the 1930s and 40s, the tales were used as propaganda by the Third Reich; later in the 20th century psychologists such as Bruno Bettelheim reaffirmed the value of the work, in spite of the cruelty and violence in original versions of some of the tales, which the Grimms eventually sanitized.

They worked to discover and crystallize a kind of Germanness in the stories that they collected because they believed that folklore contained kernels of ancient mythologies and beliefs which were crucial to understanding the essence of German culture. By examining culture from a philological point of view, they sought to establish connections between German law and culture and local beliefs.









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Grimm's Fairy Tales:


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2016年12月1日 星期四

Aesop  

Aesop       (week twelve)


Aesop was an Ancient Greek fabulist or story teller credited with a number of fables now collectively known as Aesop's Fables. Many of the tales are characterized by animals and inanimate objects that speak, solve problems, and generally have human characteristics.

Scattered details of Aesop's life can be found in ancient sources, including Aristotle, Herodotus, and Plutarch.Depictions of Aesop in popular culture over the last 2500 years have included many works of art and his appearance as a character in numerous books, films, plays, and television programs.




Art and literature:
Ancient sources mention two statues of Aesop, one by Aristodemus and another by Lysippus.
Early on, the representation of Aesop as an ugly slave emerged. The later tradition which makes Aesop a black African resulted in depictions ranging from 17th-century engravings to a television portrayal by a black comedian. In general, beginning in the 20th century, plays have shown Aesop as a slave, but not ugly, while movies and television shows (such as The Bullwinkle Show) have depicted him as neither ugly nor a slave.

Later in the 19th century the subject of Aesop telling his tales was made popular by the painting of him entertaining the maids of Xanthus by Roberto Fontana (1844-1907).A depiction of the fabulist surrounded by laughing young women, it went on to win a prize at the Milanese Brera Academy in 1876 and was then shown at the 1878 International Exhibition and the 11th exhibition of the Società di Belle Arti di Trieste in 1879. A later painting by Julian Russell Story widens Aesop's audience by showing people of both sexes and all ages enjoying his narration.Though Aesop is pictured as ugly in both, his winning personality is suggested by his smiling face and lively gestures.

Portrait of Aesop by Velázquez in the Prado:




Latin Edition:


















Early Aesop's fables picture book in 15century :

Nowadays Aesop's fables picture book:














Moral of the fables: http://www.taleswithmorals.com/

Fables: http://140.126.22.95/wbcmsc/cmain1.asp

Myth & Metaphor : http://140.126.22.95/wbcmsc/cmain1.asp

video: The Crow and the Fox (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vt3HP4VWuH0)




























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To Kill a Mockingbird  

To Kill a Mockingbird              （week eight）



A novel by Harper Lee published in 1960. It was immediately successful, winning the Pulitzer Prize, and has become a classic of modern American literature. The plot and characters are loosely based on the author's observations of her family and neighbors, as well as on an event that occurred near her hometown in 1936, when she was 10 years old.


 It was adapted into an Oscar-winning film in 1962 by director Robert Mulligan, with a screenplay by Horton Foote. Since 1990, a play based on the novel has been performed annually in Harper Lee's hometown of Monroeville, Alabama.

To Kill a Mockingbird was Lee's only published book until Go Set a Watchman, an earlier draft of To Kill a Mockingbird, was published on July 14, 2015. Lee continued to respond to her work's impact until her death in February 2016, although she had refused any personal publicity for herself or the novel since 1964.
The book was made into the well-received 1962 film with the same title.

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