Books by Marina Warner

An illustrated exploration of Helen Chadwick’s erotic, playful, and fierce 1986 installation. In 1986 the Institute of Contemporary Arts in London showed a new commission by the artist Helen Chadwick (1954–1996). What Chadwick conceived for the ICA exhibition explored her characteristic themes—the female body (her own), the aesthetics of pleasure, the material variety and wonder of phenomena—but took them in a new, flamboyant direction. In this illustrated volume, Marina Warner examines one part of Chadwick’s installation, The Oval Court. This work was erotic, playful, and fierce; it showed imaginative ambition on an exceptional scale and a unique, piquant sensibility, both raunchy and delicate. Despite the work’s recognition as a feminist monument of rare intensity, it has rarely been shown or discussed since the author’s catalogue essay for the original exhibition. Warner here reconsiders Chadwick’s influence as an artist who helped to shift conventional aesthetics and transvalue despised, even abominated forms. Exploring the work’s richly layered composition in light of intervening years, Warner shows how Chadwick’s imagination has shaped many artists’ ideas and ethics, and emboldened their adventures with materials.

A classic, enchanting document of Scottish folklore about fairies, elves, and other supernatural creatures.Late in the seventeenth century, Robert Kirk, an Episcopalian minister in the Scottish Highlands, set out to collect his parishioners' many striking stories about elves, fairies, fauns, doppelgängers, wraiths, and other beings of, in Kirk's words, "a middle nature betwixt man and angel." For Kirk these stories constituted strong evidence for the reality of a supernatural world, existing parallel to ours, which, he passionately believed, demanded exploration as much as the New World across the seas. Kirk defended these views in The Secret Commonwealth, an essay that was left in manuscript when he died in 1692. It is a rare and fascinating work, an extraordinary amalgam of science, religion, and folklore, suffused with the spirit of active curiosity and bemused wonder that fills Robert Burton's Anatomy of Melancholy and the works of Sir Thomas Browne. The Secret Commonwealth is not only a remarkable document in the history of ideas but a study of enchantment that enchants in its own right. First published in 1815 by Sir Walter Scott, then reedited in 1893 by Andrew Lang, with a dedication to Robert Louis Stevenson, The Secret Commonwealth has long been difficult to obtain-available, if at all, only in scholarly editions. This new edition modernizes the spelling and punctuation of Kirk's little book and features a wide-ranging and illuminating introduction by the critic and historian Marina Warner, who brings out the originality of Kirk's contribution and reflects on the ongoing life of fairies in the modern mind.

Places Joan in the context of the mythology of the female hero and takes note of her historical antecedents, both pagan and Christian and the role she has played up as the embodiment of an ideal, whether as Amazon, saint, child of nature, or personification of virtue.

Paula Rego's anthology of traditional nursery rhymes, illustrated by her sometimes disturbing, but always arresting engravings.

A site-specific exhibition at The Edwardian Cloakroom, Bristol by artists Julie Hill & Catherine Anyango Grünewald. Together their works in materials such as ceramics, cosmetics, smoke and mirrors used the context of the Edwardian Cloakroom as a mise-en-scène setting, drawing attention to the feminine experience as independent, both spatially and intellectually, from the Gents.

Marina Warner has gathered together a magical collection of fairy tales by the great women storytellers of the 17th and 18th centuries. These are passionate, extraordinary, and occasionally proto-feminist retellings of classic fairy stories by women who ingeniously used the fairy tale genre to comment on their own times and experiences.

When a mummy in the Museum of Albion is unpacked it is found to contain a bundle of curious objects and documents which tell of the wanderings of an unknown woman, Leto.

Like Visconti's film The Leopard, this magnificent novel paints in sensuous colours the story of a family. It brings to new life the ancient disparaged south of the Italian peninsula, weakened by emigration, silenced by fascism. According to family legend, David Pittagora died as a result of a duel.

Since the early 1970s, Marina Warner has been one of the most challenging, subtle and profound commentators on the culture of past and present, unravelling our webs of images, ideas and beliefs, and making new and provocative connections.

Ogres, giants and bogeymen embody some of our deepest fears, dominating popular storytelling in various media, from classic fairy tales such as 'Puss in Boots' to the cannibal monster Hannibal Lecter, and from Frankenstein to Men in Black.

A collection of weird and wonderful stories of beauty and horror from the writer of "The Mermaids in the Basement". Here are fabulous images of saints and sinners, bats and nightingales, pink flesh and putrefaction, treading a delicate line between the natural and the supernatural.

In early 1994 Marina Warner delivered the prestigious Reith Lectures for the BBC.

From 1861 to 1908 a woman, the Empress Dowager Tz'u-hsi, born the daughter of a minor mandarin, held the supreme power in China. THE DRAGON EMPRESS also portrays a China in rapid decline as poverty, civil war and foreign exploitation and invasion brought about the fall of the Ch'ing dynasty.