Cycles of influence: fiction, folktale, theory

Abstract

In this wide ranging and insightful analysis, Stephen Benson proposes a poetic of narrative for postmodernism by placing new emphasis on the folktale. Postmodernist fictions have evidenced a return to narrative - to storytelling centred on a sequence of events, rather than a spiralling of events as found in modernism - and recent theorists have described narrative as a central insistence of the human mind. By characterizing the folktale as a prime embodiment of narrative, Benson relates folktales to many of the theoretical concerns of postmodernism and provides new insights into the works of major writers who have used this genre, which includes the subgenre of the fairy tale, in opening narrative up to new possibilities. Benson examines the key features of folktales: their emphasis on a chain of events rather than description or consciousness, their emphasis on a self-contained fictional environment rather than realism, the presence of a storyteller as a self-confessed fabricator, their oral and communal status, and their ever-changing state, which defies authoritative versions. The arguments presented should not only interest folklorists and scholars of narrative but also readers in fields ranging from comparative literature to feminist theory.