The Heroine with 1001 Faces, Maria Tatar
The Heroine with 1001 Faces, Maria Tatar
2 Rating(s)
List: $24.99 | Sale: $17.50
Club: $12.49

The Heroine with 1001 Faces

Author: Maria Tatar

Narrator: Julie McKay

Unabridged: 12 hr 9 min

Format: Digital Audiobook Download

Publisher: Tantor Media

Published: 09/14/2021


Synopsis

World-renowned folklorist Maria Tatar reveals an astonishing but long buried history of heroines, taking us from Cassandra and Scheherazade to Nancy Drew and Wonder Woman.

How do we explain our newfound cultural investment in empathy and social justice? For decades, Joseph Campbell had defined our cultural aspirations in The Hero with a Thousand Faces, emphasizing the value of seeking glory and earning immortality. His work became the playbook for Hollywood, with its many male-centric quest narratives.

Challenging the models in Campbell's canonical work, Maria Tatar explores how heroines, rarely wielding a sword and deprived of a pen, have flown beneath the radar even as they have been bent on social missions. Using the domestic arts and storytelling skills, they have displayed audacity, curiosity, and care as they struggled to survive and change the reigning culture. Animating figures from Ovid's Philomela, her tongue severed yet still weaving a tale about sexual assault, to Stieg Larsson's Lisbeth Salander, a high-tech wizard seeking justice for victims of a serial killer, The Heroine with 1,001 Faces creates a luminous arc that takes us from ancient times to the present.

About Maria Tatar

Maria Tatar is the John L. Loeb Professor and a senior fellow at Harvard University. The editor of the Norton Critical Edition of The Classic Fairy Tales and The Annotated Brothers Grimm, she lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts.


Reviews

Goodreads review by Brian on December 09, 2021

I’m real glad to see this book appear, and I’m sure it will unleash a slew of new works that build on its theme. I want to give it four stars largely for launching such a fantastic conversation. Tatar is obviously a master folklorist, and her book is mainly a history of storytelling -- with a focus......more

Goodreads review by Maia on June 17, 2021

Maria Tatar's book was a revelation and a vindication. After reading Joseph's Campbell's The Hero with A Thousand Faces, I felt uneasy--I had always assumed 'hero' was used in the 'hero's journey' as a gender neutral term, in the old-fashioned way that 'he' or 'mankind' was used as the default to me......more

Goodreads review by B. H. on April 19, 2022

Not going to lie, I skimmed the last 50 pages because I simply could not with this shell of a book. This book was a huge letdown. For me, it joins a string of books about feminist topics written by well-respected academics that commit the double crime of being dull, and poorly argued. These books (li......more

Goodreads review by Hannah on December 28, 2021

2021 Best Books of the Year [#09 of 11]......more

Goodreads review by Geonn on September 28, 2021

3.5, kind of rounded up… mainly because I just didn’t want to round down. This *is* a good book, covering a lot of ground and providing a valuable resource that has been badly needed for a long time. But I can’t give it higher because of two things I kept coming back to… * the author (perhaps inadve......more