James Joyceʼs fairy tale Cat and the devil as a picture book for children

Blažić, Milena Mileva (author)

In a letter of the world-renowned Irish writer James Joyce to his grandson Stephen handwritten fairy tales were found with the implicit title The Cat of Beaugency, later renamed The Cat and the Devil and The Cats of Copenhagen, with illustrations by Casey Sorrow. The fairy tales were published posthumously, e.g. The Cat and the Devil in Letters of James Joyce, 1957. International interest in Joyce’s children’s literature is high, as both short contemporary fairy tales have been published several times in the picture book edition and have been translated into many languages. James Joyce is interesting for Slovenia too, first because he and his girlfriend and later wife Nora Barnacle, on their way to Trieste, accidentally left the train at the Ljubljana train station, where a memorial was also erected (sculptor Jakov Brdar, 2003). Secondly, his literary fairy tale The Cat and the Devil is also intertextually linked with Slovenian folk tradition, notably the Bohinj fairy tale, and also with the tradition of Friuli-Venezia Giulia, since in Ci-vidale stands a large stone-made Devil’s Bridge across the Natisone River, and there are also bridges bearing the same name elsewhere.

• Language: Slovenian
• Keywords: motivi
• Work type: Article
• Typology: 1.01 - Original Scientific Article
• Organization: PEF - Faculty of Education
• Publisher: Permʹ: Permskij gosudarstvennyj nacionalʹnyj issledovatelʹskij universitet
• Year: 2019
• Number of pages: 16-30
• PID: 20.500.12556/RUL-113490
• ISSN: 2587-9987
• COBISS.SI-ID: 12770121
• Publication date in RUL: 15.01.2020

Secondary language

• Language: English
• Keywords: James Joyce