AURELIA

ART AND LITERATURE THROUGH THE MOUTH OF THE FAIRY TALE

(Reaktion Books, 2017)

“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

“This deliriously lovely book newly illuminates the thrill, the seduction and the horror of the fairy-tale imagination. Its labile connections, its puns, its plays on words, take the reader forever unawares and deliver up choice, gilded, unexpected treats. In her gorgeous prose and with her unequaled visual imagination, Carol Mavor takes us into a wonderland where a lamb suckles at a young girl’s breast, parents crave to eat their children, and passions are as sugar-coated as they are strange. Hedonistic, rapacious, enchanted by fragility, by passing butterfly pleasures, Mavor is unflinching and acute in her analysis of family romance and of the darkness of these childhood tales.” — Emma Wilson

“Aurelia invites us to share Carol Mavor’s journeys through the rabbit-hole of poetic consciousness into the realm of primordial – fantasmatic – desire. It is all at once alluring, seductive, illuminating, and frightening.” — Hayden White

“Is it possible to write critically about fairy tales by writing a fairy tale? Until reading Carol Mavor’s stunning ‘magical’ analysis of how fairy tales transform themselves and influence all aspects of art, literature, and life, I would have said, no. Yet, Mavor has proven me wrong, for she has created an extraordinary, poetical and analytical fairy-tale that embraces all types of fairy tales and demonstrates how we comprehend and metonymically live our lives through these stories . . . Though Mavor explores sadism, cruelty, and darkness in fairy tales and related works, she does this with the hopeful intention that the gold of art and literature will shine and lead us to see the world anew. This is why she employs well over a hundred photographs which are literally breath taking.” — Jack Zipes

Book of the week: Aurelia is book of the week for the photo-eye blog (Santa Fe, New Mexico).
Read the review of Aurelia by Laura M. André and experience the book tease.