SOURCE: Warner, Marina. “The Flavour of Utopia.” Times Literary Supplement, no. 4713 (30 July 1993): 7.

In the following review, Warner finds Lurie's selections in The Oxford Book of Modern Fairy Tales somewhat arbitrary due to the volume's lack of unifying linguistic, literary, or historical context.

Children play adult games (pretending to be the Mafia in Sicily, Jack the Ripper in London). Fairy-tales, as a branch of literature, frequently represent the reverse: grown-ups pretending childlikeness in order to make things better. Novalis wrote in his notebooks, “a child is good deal cleverer and wiser than an adult—but the child must be an ironic child”. This kind of child, he continued, could tell stories that were “a prophetic account of things—an ideal account”: fairy-tale. Masked as a young, clever and wise innocent, the writer could imagine the ideal in fantasies; play-acting a child who is an ideal child, the teller of...