The Golden Age of American Cinema Up Close and Personal. The famous director who roughed up a death row inmate during a prison interview to get the emotional reaction he wanted | the Disney movie into which was inserted an image from Playboy magazine forcing a VHS recall | the model for a company whose logo was “99 & 44/100% Pure” who made a fortune as a porn star. These and dozens of other choice movie-making anecdotes comprise American Film Tales, a genre by genre tour through the secret history of Hollywood back-story folklore. Famous directors, actors, movies and critics feature in this compendium of movie stories, making American Film Tales the ideal book companion for home theatre buffs in the digital age and faced with an array of viewing choices. Comprehensively researched and organized into easy to access genre-themed chapters, Hollywood history has never been as accessible and as infotaining as it is here and now.

The 525 notable works of 19th and 20th century American fiction in this reference book have many stage, movie, television, and video adaptations. Each literary work is described and then every adaptation is examined with a discussion of how accurate the version is and how well it succeeds in conveying the spirit of the original in a different medium. In addition to famous novels and short stories by authors such as Nathaniel Hawthorne, F. Scott Fitzgerald, and Willa Cather, many bestsellers, mysteries, children's books, young adult books, horror novels, science fiction, detective stories, and sensational potboilers from the past two centuries are examined.

The fairy tale has become one of the dominant cultural forms and genres internationally, thanks in large part to its many manifestations on screen. Yet the history and relevance of the fairy-tale film have largely been neglected. In this follow-up to Jack Zipes’s award-winning book The Enchanted Screen (2011), Fairy-Tale Films Beyond Disney offers the first book-length multinational, multidisciplinary exploration of fairy-tale cinema. Bringing together twenty-three of the world’s top fairy-tale scholars to analyze the enormous scope of these films, Zipes and colleagues Pauline Greenhill and Kendra Magnus-Johnston present perspectives on film from every part of the globe, from Hayao Miyazaki’s Spirited Away, to Jan Švankmajer’s Alice, to the transnational adaptations of 1001 Nights and Hans Christian Andersen. Contributors explore filmic traditions in each area not only from their different cultural backgrounds, but from a range of academic fields, including criminal justice studies, education, film studies, folkloristics, gender studies, and literary studies. Fairy-Tale Films Beyond Disney offers readers an opportunity to explore the intersections, disparities, historical and national contexts of its subject, and to further appreciate what has become an undeniably global phenomenon.

The fairy tale is arguably one of the most important cultural and social influences on children's lives. But until the first publication of Fairy Tales and the Art of Subversion, little attention had been paid to the ways in which the writers and collectors of tales used traditional forms and genres in order to shape children's lives – their behavior, values, and relationship to society. As Jack Zipes convincingly shows in this classic work, fairy tales have always been a powerful discourse, capable of being used to shape or destabilize attitudes and behavior within culture. How and why did certain authors try to influence children or social images of children? How were fairy tales shaped by the changes in European society in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries? Zipes examines famous writers of fairy tales such as Charles Perrault, Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm, Hans Christian Andersen and L.Frank Baum and considers the extraordinary impact of Walt Disney on the genre as a fairy tale filmmaker.

This Oxford companion provides an authoritative reference source for fairy tales, exploring the tales themselves, both ancient and modern, the writers who wrote and reworked them and related topics such as film, art, opera and even advertising.

Scholars of fairy-tale studies will enjoy Bacchilega's significant new study of contemporary adaptations.

In recent years, gold-standard experimental evidence on the benefits of reading fiction has exploded. Why do we love stories from books, TV and movies, and videogames? What do fictional stories have to do with stories from real life? How do stories impact our own and our children's brain development, reading skills, social understanding, and well-being? In How Stories Change Us, Elaine Reese integrates the latest scientific research on stories from fiction (books, TV shows and movies, videogames) with stories from real life (our personal experiences, including on social media) across the lifespan. The book offers an authoritative yet accessible overview of the new interdisciplinary science of stories, told by a developmental psychologist and autobiographical memory expert with over thirty years of experience conducting research on stories. Throughout, Reese adopts a developmental perspective by tracing the impact of stories from pre-birth to old age. Drawing upon illustrative examples from her 20-year longitudinal study Origins of Memory as well as from her own life, Reese synthesizes cutting-edge research on the benefits and pitfalls of stories and offers practical tips for parents, teachers, librarians, and policymakers. Reese concludes that people have a preferred fictional story delivery system, whether it's reading, watching, or gaming, and she advocates for a more integrated science of stories to allow us to better choose the stories we consume and tell.