Abstract
Jane Yolen is often called the Hans Christian Andersen of America because of her many original fairy tales and retellings of old stories, plus her numerous novels, picture books, and poems based on folklore and fairy tales. In “Sewing the Nettle Shirt, Pulling the Sword,” Yolen looks at the stories from her childhood that shoved her onto the literary storytelling path. She also parses a few well-known fairy stories in ways that may surprise the reader, linking her own tales as securely to modern culture and politics as Victorian and earlier tales were anchored in their own world. Explaining that she writes “not in cursive but in folklore,” she asserts that she is “drenched in mythos and it comes out as story.”
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Learn about institutional subscriptionsBibliography of Books by Jane Yolen
B.U.G. (Big Ugly Guy) with Adam Stemple. 2013. New York: Dutton [Golem].
Boots and the Seven Leaguers. 2000. San Diego: Harcourt [Trolls].
Briar Rose. 1992. New York: Tor Books [Sleeping Beauty].
Centaur Rising. 2014. New York: Holt [Centaurs].
Curse of the Thirteenth Fey. 2012. New York: Philomel [Sleeping Beauty].
The Dragon’s Boy. 1990. New York: HarperCollins [King Arthur].
Except the Queen, with Midori Snyder. 2010. New York: NAL/ROC Books [Baba Yaga, Faerie Queen, Seelie and Unseelie Courts].
Finding Baba Yaga. 2018. New York: Tor.com Publishing. [Baba Yaga, Firebird, Kostchai the Deathless].
The Last Tsar’s Dragons with Adam Temple. 2019. San Francisco: Tachyon books [Dragons].
The Magic Three of Solatia. 1974. New York: T. Y. Crowell [Mermaids].
Mapping the Bones. 2018. New York: Philomel [Hansel & Gretel].
The Mermaid’s Three Wisdoms. 1978. New York: Philomel [Merfolk].
Pay the Piper. with Adam Stemple. 2006. New York: Starscape/Tor Books [Pied Piper].
A Plague of Unicorns. 2015. Grand Rapids, MI: ZonderKidz/Harper [Unicorns].
The Seaman. 1998. New York: Philomel [Merfolk].
The SeelieWars Trilogy. 2013. New York: Viking Books [Seelie and Unseelie Courts, Drows, Dwarves, Trolls]. Book One: The Hostage Prince, 2013; Book Two: The Last Changeling, 2015; Book Three: The Seelie King’s War, 2016.
Snow in Summer. 2011. New York: Philomel [Snow White].
Sword of the Rightful King. 2003. San Diego: Harcourt [King Arthur].
Troll Bridge with Adam Stemple. 2006. New York: Starscape/Tor Books [Trolls].
The Wild Hunt. 1995. San Diego and New York: Harcourt Brace/Scholastic [Wild Hunt, White Queen, Herne the Hunter].
Wizard’s Hall. 1991. San Diego: Harcourt Brace/Scholastic/Harcourt’s Magic Carpet [Wizards, Magic Education].
Young Merlin Trilogy. 1996. San Diego: Harcourt: [Arthurian mythos]. 1. Passager; 2. Hobby, 1996; 3. Merlin, 1997.
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Yolen, J. (2019). Sewing the Nettle Shirt, Pulling the Sword. In: Miller, N.J., Purkiss, D. (eds) Literary Cultures and Medieval and Early Modern Childhoods. Literary Cultures and Childhoods. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-14211-7_24
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-14211-7_24
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Publisher Name: Palgrave Macmillan, Cham
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Online ISBN: 978-3-030-14211-7
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