Fractured Fairy Tales and Subversion: Red Ridin’ in the Hood and Other Cuentos by Patricia Marcantonio

Teaching Fairy Tales

Reviewed by Jennifer Marchant Martin, Ann. Red Riding Hood and the Wolf in Bed: Modernism's Fairy Tales. Toronto: U of Toronto P, 2006. In Alice to the Lighthouse: Children's Books and Radical Experiments in Art, Juliet Dusinberre sets out to connect the child readers of Alice and other children's literature not only with the adults they later became, [End Page 289] "but to a generation of thought and writing" (1). How, she asks, did such modern writers as Virginia Woolf, reflect and transform their childhood reading in their own texts? Ann Martin explores a similar question in Red Riding Hood and the Wolf in Bed: Modernism's Fairy Tales. She examines how three modern writers' allusions to fairy tales reflect these writers' views of their cultures, including such anxiety-laden factors as sexuality and gender roles, class mobility, commodification, and the relationships between tradition and present. In the first chapter, "Turning Back the Covers: Fairy Tales in the Modern Age," Martin briefly summarizes the history of the literary fairy tale in Western culture, from Apuleius's "Cupid and Psyche" in the second century AD, to the French salons of the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries and British chapbooks through the eighteenth century, to the pantomimes and Christmas books of the Victorians. She emphasizes the nineteenth-century's ambivalence about fairy tales: on the one hand, they evoked the "innocence" and "primitive nature" of the child and the peasant, whereas, on the other, their adaptation into modern culture in such forms as pantomimes, advertisements, and expensive picture books, suggested corruption and commodification. Martin suggests that this conflicted feeling, as well as the large number of variants, helped make the fairy tale a rich source of allusions for modern writers. In this chapter, Martin also explains her decision to focus specifically upon James Joyce, Virginia Woolf, and Djuna Barnes. Although other twentieth-century writers reference fairy tales in their work, these three are among those who "use the stories to involve not just the past but the present" (40). Thus, Joyce, Woolf, and Barnes not only use the stories to suggest nostalgia and innocence, but to explore contemporary conflicts. Their fairy tale allusions also suggest the characters' and readers' power to make meaning. The characters actively adapt fairy tales to make sense of their lives, and readers must examine multiple, sometimes contradictory, fairy tale references to arrive at their own conclusions. Martin then proceeds to in-depth explorations of these writers' fairy tale allusions in some of their texts, drawing upon cultural, psychological, and gender theory to do so. In "James Joyce: The Fashionable Fairy Tale," Martin suggests that Joyce uses "Cinderella" to investigate both the possibility of class mobility in modern times and the loss of self this may involve. For example, in Joyce's Ulysses, Stephen Daedalus is offered employment by several fairy godmother figures, but fears they would make him "a commodity in a capitalist system toward which he feels most ambivalent" (64). However, characters can also use fairy tales for their own ends, as is shown by the characters of Bloom and Gerty Macdowell, [End Page 290] who use "Beauty and the Beast" as a pattern for their sexual fantasies, but also tailor the story to meet their individual needs. In "Virginia Woolf: A Slipper of One's Own," Martin notes that fairy tales were very much a part of Woolf's literary upbringing. She made frequent reference to them in her journals and essays, as well as in her fiction. In particular, Martin describes the influence of Woolf's aunt, Anne Thackery Ritchie, who wrote adaptations of older fairy tales, such as Perrault's "Cinderella." Martin suggests that, in citing and transforming these stories, Woolf both acknowledges Ritchie as a female literary ancestress, and sabotages the Victorian values reflected in Ritchie's adaptations. In Woolf's Orlando, for example, the protagonist undergoes Cinderella-like transformations, but subverts traditional views of social...

Reviewed by: Fairy Tales and the Art of Subversion: The Classical Genre for Children and the Process of Civilization, and: The Trials and Tribulations of Little Red Riding Hood: Versions of the Tale in Sociocultural Context Perry Nodelman Zipes, Jack . Fairy Tales and the Art of Subversion: The Classical Genre for Children and the Process of Civilization. London: Heinemann, and New York: Wildman Press, 1983. (Available directly from the publisher at 19 West 44th Street, New York, NY, 10036.) Zipes, Jack . The Trials and Tribulations of Little Red Riding Hood: Versions of the Tale in Sociocultural Context. South Hadley, Massachusetts: Bergin and Garvey, Ltd., 1983. In Fairy Tales and the Art of Subversion, Jack Zipes says, "the fairy tale is the most important cultural and social event in most children's lives." He doesn't really mean it, of course—unless he actually intends to downplay the significance of television, school, toilet-training, other children, Santa Claus, grandmothers, peanut butter, and parenting. But Jack Zipes is never one to fool around with subtle implications. He says that the fairy tale writers of Perrault's time "sought to civilize children to inhibit them, and perhaps pervert their natural growth," and he hints darkly about "where socialization through the reading of the Grimms' tales has led us"—as if those stories were responsible for the whole awful way the world is nowadays. Meanwhile, "What saves Andersen's tales from simply becoming sentimental homilies (which many of them are) was his extraordinary understanding of how class struggle affected the lives of people in his times," and "Baum sought to subvert the American socialization process based on competition and achievement"; as for "The Selfish Giant," "Obviously it is related to Wilde's homosexuality, and he depicted the love for the boy as a form of liberation." Obviously? It's only after one adjusts to Zipes' penchant for exaggeration that one realizes what he means: when he says that fairy tales are the most important social and cultural influence on children, he actually means that the tales do have some social and cultural significance. And he is right. The writers who first borrowed these tales from the oral tradition changed them so they would communicate their own values to the children who heard them. As societies changed their mind about which values they wished to communicate to children, these stories changed. As he did in his earlier book, Breaking the Magic Spell, Zipes explores these changes to show how they are "part of the historical civilizing process." In Fairy Tales and the Art of Subversion he goes over the ground covered in that earlier book in more detail, and with greater concentration on the mainstream of fairy tales written for or read by children in English-speaking countries; and he shows how, for the past five hundred or so years, we adults have used fairy tales to impress upon children the ideals we have fallen away from themselves. Unfortunately, Zipes notices how repressive that is only when he doesn't himself share the particular ideals in question. When it's aristocrats trying to make their children into aristocrats, that's disgusting; when it's contemporary West Germans trying to make their children believe in collective action, that's delightful. Zipes wants us to go on repressing children just the way we always have-only this time, we're supposed to repress them with values he shares instead of ones he feel superior to. But the most unfortunate result of Zipes' insistence on arguing from the unobjective viewpoint of his own political position is that is causes him to seriously misrepresent the history he claims to be revealing. While he quite correctly says that the fairy tales of the Victorian period were affected by "the development of a strong proletarian class, industrialization, urbanization, educational reform acts, evangelism," and so on, he says nothing about literary or artistic trends—about the Victorian fascination with things mediaeval, about Pre-Raphaelitism and its dreamy mooning over gothic artifacts, and so on. I suspect Zipes ignores such elements in the tales of Wilde and MacDonald because to acknowledge them would force him to admit that these tales are escapist, not...

MLR, I03.2, 2oo8 525 Red Riding Hood and the Wolf inBed: Modernism's Fairy Tales. By ANN MARTIN. Toronto and London: University of Toronto Press. 2oo6. ix+ I99 PP. ?32. ISBN 978-o-8020-go86-7. The malleability of the fairy tale is, today, an almost taken-for-granted assumption in academic circles. So, for Ann Martin to suggest thatcertainmodernist writers re fashion thebetter-known European fairy tales (she focuses specifically on versions of 'Sleeping Beauty', 'SnowWhite', 'Cinderella', 'LittleRed Riding Hood', 'Beauty and theBeast', and 'The Fisherman and hisWife' popularized by theGrimms, Perrault, and de Beaumont (p. i6)) is a less than novel argument. Were this the underlying thesis ofMartin's book, itcould simply be tossed on the pile marked 'unoriginal' in the increasing gamut of fairy-tale scholarship. However, from the outset Martin is concerned with elaborating the dichotomy in early twentieth-century responses to the fairy tale. The premiss upon which her argument rests is that thedominant conception of childhood isone ofnostalgic recon struction foran inevitably lost time (hereMartin needs tobe precise that this isnot the Romantic view of childhood but a perversion thereof). This is then connected with a popular view of 'folk' culture as representative of amore primitive yet 'authentic' stage of development. In stark contrast to this, Martin suggests thather three representatives ofmoder nism-James Joyce,Virginia Woolf, and the often-neglected Djuna Barnes-utilize the fairy tale as an aperture throughwhich the chaotic experiences ofmodernity can be renegotiated. ForMartin, the fairytale isa dynamic narrative: at one level itcan be viewed as ameans to propagate themores of a given society, at another itsadaptabi litycan be seen as interrogatingquestions of social and cultural significance. It is this dynamism, Martin argues, which accounts for the fairytale's appeal to thesewriters. Integral toher concept of dynamism is the sheer number of literary fairy tales that Martin states are available forconsumption at the turnof thecentury.As each author encodes many variations, the ensuing profusion undermines notions of authority and fixityofmeaning. Juxtaposing versions of 'Sleeping Beauty' enables Clarissa Dalloway to explore thepotentialities of her own identity; thedifferentversions of 'Cinderella' which Joyce inflects inUlysses suggest a range of available plot structures and charac terizations; for Matthew O'Connor inNightwood 'Little Red Riding Hood' provides a narrative which suggests the transformative possibilities of deception and disguise. Martin argues that thesewriters use the fairy tale not to prescribe social identities but rather to represent a subject who takes advantage of 'unscripted interventions' (P. 125) to explore the experience ofmodernity and capitalist consumer culture. Yet an appreciation of Martin's adroit argument must be temperedwith a reserva tion: her theoretical position isdependent upon the identification and interpretation of variation and, while from the outset she states she will limitherself to a few fairy tales, thisnarrow scope is a severe constraint and, potentially, could be read as point ing to the possible cultural pre-eminence of particular versions of these tales.None the less, over the course of the book Martin makes a convincing argument for the alignment of the fairy talewith the experience ofmodernity in theworks of these authors. Reading the fairy tale as offering 'interpretative possibilities' (p. i i6) (a position that is,arguably, not exclusive to thisgenre) allows thesemodernist writers to free the tales of their links to amythic past, instead deploying them as narratives of exploration in amodern, consumer age. BIRMINGHAMCITY UNIVERSITY SARAH WOOD ...

BackgroundInternet browsing is a daily activity for many young people. However, how internet browsing affects young people’s resilience and positive (vs negative) outlook on life remains largely unaddressed. Critically, how reading classical fairy tales may help mitigate the influence of internet browsing on resilience and foster a more positive rather than negative outlook on life has yet to be explored.ObjectiveThis study examines the influence of internet browsing on young people’s resilience and positive (vs negative) outlook on life. Furthermore, this study aims to examine the potential mitigating effect of reading classical Grimms' fairy tales, such as Hansel and Gretel and Little Red Riding Hood, on the relationship between internet browsing and postgraduate students’ resilience and outlook on life.MethodsA randomized controlled study was conducted using a 2 (internet browsing vs no internet browsing) × 2 (reading a classical fairy tale vs no classical fairy tale) between-subjects design. All study participants (N=412) were postgraduate students and randomly assigned to one of the study’s 4 conditions and answered a brief questionnaire, examining their resilience and positive versus negative outlook on life. To examine the potential mitigating effect of classical fairy tales on the relationship between internet browsing and resilience as well as positive versus negative outlook on life, we conducted an exploratory bootstrapping-based moderated mediation analysis with 5000 resamples.ResultsThe results showed a significant moderating role of reading classical Grimms' fairy tales on the negative effect of internet browsing on postgraduate students’ resilience and outlook on life. Specifically, when study participants browsed the internet, they reported a more positive outlook on life when they read a Grimms' fairy tale (read fairy tale: mean 5.46, SD 0.151 vs not read fairy tale: mean 3.01, SD 0.150, SE 0.213, 95% CI –2.860 to –2.024; P<.001). Furthermore, the results showed that when participants browsed the internet, they indicated significantly greater resilience when they read a Grimms' tale (mean 4.62, SE 0.179, 95% CI 4.271-4.976) than when they did not (mean 2.59, SE 0.179, 95% CI 2.243-2.945). In addition, an exploratory analysis demonstrated that the effect of internet browsing on outlook on life is mediated by resilience (effect 0.85, SE 0.17, 95% CI 0.52-1.20).ConclusionsThe findings of this study show that reading a classical Grimms' fairy tale, such as Hansel and Gretel or Little Red Riding Hood, helped mitigate the negative effects of internet browsing on postgraduate students’ resilience and outlook on life.Trial RegistrationISRCTN 16972408; https://www.isrctn.com/ISRCTN16972408

Reviewed by: Twice Upon a Time: Women Writers and the History of the Fairy Tale Lisette Luton (bio) Twice Upon a Time: Women Writers and the History of the Fairy Tale. By Elizabeth Wanning Harries. Princeton, NJ: Princeton UP, 2001 In this provocative study of the origins of contemporary notions about fairy tales as an extension of the oral tradition, Elizabeth Wanning Harries flips current fairy-tale theory on its head. Addressing those who believe that the fairy tales of Perrault, the brothers Grimm, and others were transcriptions of ancient tales passed down orally by illiterate peasants, Harries immediately puts the reader on shaky ground by maintaining that "the history of fairy tales is not primarily a history of oral transmission but rather a history of print" (4). In the introduction, Harries begins by looking at ways in which fairy tales are usually defined, debunking popular myths about fairy tales along the way. For example, although the term fairy tale suggests that these stories are about fairies, Harries shows that most fairy tales do not actually include fairies. Additionally, fairy tales have long been thought of primarily as "children's literature"; Harries shows this to be a misconception. Chapter 1 deals with the canonization of fairy tales. Since canonization necessarily involves decisions regarding what to leave in and what to leave out, exclusions from the literary canon can be seen as indicative of various social and literary issues of the time period in which the exclusions occur. Harries points out that although most of the writers of fairy tales in the 1690s were women, only Perrault's tales have remained within the canon. Harries theorizes that Perrault's fairy tales were considered authentic because they claimed to be transcriptions of peasant storytelling and they were written in a simplistic way, reminiscent of the "folk." The Grimms, the abbé de Villiers, and C. A. Walckenaer propagated this image by praising Perrault for his naive style that they believed imitated or suggested the style of the oral, folk storyteller. In the case of Villiers, he not only praised Perrault but also dismissed the fairy tales written by women writers such as D'Aulnoy because of their length and complexity. I believe that the exclusion of women writers of fairy tales from the literary canon has less to do with Villiers' assessment of them than with a general gender bias that has occurred in the history of French literature. At a time when women writers were relegated to literary salons, most of the seventeenth-century fairy tales were written by women, yet only Perrault's have been canonized. In chapter 2, Harries shows impressive research as she explains how the image of the storyteller came to be associated with the peasant nursemaid "raconteuse" symbolized by "Mother Goose." She explores the work of several women fairy-tale writers of the 1690s whom she refers to as "conteuses." These include D'Aulnoy, Murat, and Lhéritier. She stresses that the conteuses chose to portray a different kind of orality from the peasant storyteller of Perrault. They placed their fairy tales in the context of the literary salon, making them the domain of educated upper-class nobles who told stories to amuse one another. [End Page 51] While Perrault claims to have taken his stories directly from the oral tradition, Harries demonstrates that he may have been influenced by the stories of the conteuses who actually published several years earlier than Perrault. The conteuses rarely made any reference to the peasant oral tradition, but instead admitted to have taken some of their stories from sixteenth-century texts by Straparola and early seventeenth-century texts by Basile, both written sources. Chapter 3 can be summed up by Harries' statement: "The history of the fairy tale in England is largely a history of translation" (80). The works of the Grimms, Perrrault, Andersen, and others were translated and circulated around England. For example, Perrault's "Little Red Riding Hood" and "Puss in Boots" were popular. The few truly English tales would include "Tom Thumb" and "Jack the Giant Killer." A curious phenomenon occurred somewhere along the way. Some of these tales translated from other languages came to be thought...

Reviewed by: Language and Gender in the Fairy Tale Tradition: A Linguistic Analysis of Old and New Story Telling Jeana Jorgensen (bio) Language and Gender in the Fairy Tale Tradition: A Linguistic Analysis of Old and New Story Telling. By Alessandra Levorato . New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003. 230 pp. In Language and Gender in the Fairy Tale Tradition, Alessandra Levorato utilizes a linguistic approach to analyze the ideologies at work in fairy tales, namely "Little Red Riding Hood" (AT 333). Levorato examines both traditional and radical versions of the tale in the light of how ideologies are embedded in texts at various levels and thus produce meaning. Her book is a refreshing examination of how linguistic and formal qualities of fairy tales are not only [End Page 316] significant components of the tales in their own right but also influence the construction of fairy-tale gender roles and sexuality in a way that is inextricably linked with the production and expression of ideological biases on the part of both readers and writers. Levorato outlines her methodological approach and her data choices in the first chapter, "Introduction: Exploring Gender Issues in Fairy Tales." She considers her book to be unique for its melding of complementary critical (though not folkloristic) strategies. Levorato names as her primary theoretical influences M. A. K. Halliday's functional grammar, based on the notion that "every choice regarding the structure of a text is a choice about how to signify" (3); Norman Fairclough's three-dimensional framework of analysis, which views a text as simultaneously "a discursive practice, text and social practice" (3); and Theo Van Leeuwen's theory of social actors, founded upon a "set of sociological categories" that "investigate the way social actors and social action are represented in discourse" (4). Levorato also cites computer-based quantitative analysis as one of her main tools. Her use of quantitative analysis reveals, for instance, that "ideological standpoints are passed on not just by means of single words but also, and especially, in grammatical and lexical patterns" (12). This standpoint is reflected in the progression of her analysis from the simplest constituent of fairy tales, the word, to the more syntactically and semantically complex relational clauses and social roles within the tales. Next, Levorato gives synopses of twelve versions of "Little Red Riding Hood" spanning three hundred years, ranging from Paul Delarue's reconstruction of a French oral version to literary versions, some overtly patriarchal, such as the versions of Charles Perrault and the Brothers Grimm, and some radically feminist, such as versions written by Angela Carter and the Merseyside Fairy Story Collective. As The Trials and Tribulations of Little Red Riding Hood, the latter is a useful companion volume to Levorato's book. In chapter 2, "Words, Gender, and Power," Levorato shares the results of the quantitative analysis she performed, filtered through terminology belonging to linguistics. The insights obtained from comparing word counts and collocations (the habitual co-occurrence of words) in different versions of the tale demonstrate that "patterns of co-occurrence, the frequency and distribution of items, and even the syntactic structures in which words are embedded deeply affect meaning" (31), to the point that the underlying assumptions of various words can be used to develop different meanings. Also, this type of analysis shows "how a word which in itself is not in the least sexist can indeed become so if used asymmetrically" (31). Attention to asymmetries continues to inform Levorato's analysis in chapter 3, "The Representation of Social Practice." After a somewhat unwieldy explication of Van Leeuwen's terminology that she uses in this chapter, Levorato [End Page 317] launches into an analysis of how the authors of the dozen tales represent their respective characters. Her analysis demonstrates that the characters' identities are often described in radically different ways according to gender; for instance, female characters are likely to be situated only in relationships to other characters, whereas male characters are more likely to be portrayed with independent identities. At the end of this chapter, Levorato summarizes her findings to show how the writers of these tales all make choices through which "they have variously contributed to the maintenance of patterns of subordination...

Katherine Mansfield's interest in the literary rendering of subjective perspectives manifests a more general modernist questioning of a realist mode of representation, and her deployment of fantasy and fairy tale elements in her stories often testifies to a desire to account for a more complex portrayal of experience. However, fantasy can also be, for Mansfield's characters, ‘a deceiving friend’.1 This article seeks to analyse the ways in which Mansfield deploys the fairy tale motif of ‘Little Red Riding Hood’ in her story ‘The Little Governess’ (1915). The notions provided by Jack Zipes's socio-historical approach to the fairy tale foreground the transformations that ‘Little Red Riding Hood’ underwent in the process of being recorded, and the relevance of the ideological bias imposed on the most popular literary versions. In ‘The Little Governess’, Mansfield's refashioning of the tale already shows an acute awareness of the role of fairy tales as socialising agents, more specifically as perpetuators of gender notions. Through a characteristically modernist manipulation of narrative perspective which privileges the protagonist's point of view, Mansfield articulates a criticism of a model of education which not only relegates women to a state of undesirable naïveté but also punishes them for their own gullibility.

Reviewed by: Metamorphosis: The Dynamics of Symbolism in European Fairy Tales Jeana Jorgensen (bio) Metamorphosis: The Dynamics of Symbolism in European Fairy Tales. By Francisco Vaz da Silva . New York: Peter Lang, 2002. 278 pp. In Metamorphosis, Francisco Vaz da Silva synthesizes folkloristic, psychoanalytic, semiotic, and anthropological scholarship to introduce a new frame for understanding the symbolism in fairy tales. As Alan Dundes notes in his Editor's Preface to the book, one of the key features of Vaz da Silva's analysis is his "entirely original" synthesis of the works of Freud and Lévi-Strauss. Lévi-Strauss's notion of "mythism" informs Vaz da Silva's thinking, as do Freud's theories on the unconscious and sexuality. Vaz da Silva follows Dundes in utilizing folklore—which is "largely unconscious and involves projection" (3)—as not only material for the study of worldview, but he also suggests that fairy tales contain imagery that allows people to project symbolic themes "onto daily life events" (5). Vaz da Silva begins by linking transformations in Iberian fairy tales to superstitions that mirror their thematic concerns. In chapter 1, "Fairy Tales and Ethnography," he connects werewolves to shamans through otherworldly journeys and skin-changing, concluding that "in shamanic narrations, in dreams, and of course in fairy tales, whatever unconscious elements there are [End Page 320] appear encoded in cultural patterns and motifs" (19). Vaz da Silva interprets these unconscious elements by deciding to apply psychoanalysis not to the folklore itself, which risks dissolving the subject, but rather to "previously reconstituted symbolic patterns" (19). However, Vaz da Silva does not adequately explain his reluctance to psychoanalyze fairy-tale characters, a method utilized by Dundes and Bengt Holbek. He proceeds to criticize Holbek for his reductionistic use of projection in his Interpretation of Fairy Tales, and reexamines allomotifs in "King Wivern" (AT 433B). Using examples from Holbek and the Grimms, Vaz da Silva shows that "the essence of metamorphosis is an alternation between the inner and the outer, the hairy and the hairless, the bloody and the milky dimensions of complex beings cyclically turned inside out" (27). These symbolic equivalencies, along with details of Iberian beliefs, help resolve problems of dual feminine identity in a Portuguese variant of "Little Red Riding Hood" (AT 333), "The Girl of the Little Red Hat." Vaz da Silva lengthily discusses AT 333 in chapter 3, but here his aim is to show the connection between cyclic alternation in the oral tales and superstitions of a region. The male aspect of skin-changing receives considerably more attention. Utilizing content from fairy tales and traditions worldwide, Vaz da Silva associates skin-shedding with dragon-slaying, as excess children, born with a symbolic extra skin, seem fated to become dragon slayers. This is related to Propp's insight, often quoted in this book, that the one born from the dragon is fated to kill the dragon. Vaz da Silva switches gears to incorporate Norse sacrifices, Greek gender-bending, and Biblical bleeding in chapter 2, "Metamorphosis and Ontological Complexity." He considers characteristics of Odin and builds a homology between self-sacrifice and slaying one's ancestor. Like Odin, who gives up an eye for omniscience, the Greek prophet Teiresias overcomes sensory perception to "see" in a different sense, except his foresight is linked to serpents and sex-swapping. Turning to Genesis, Vaz da Silva discusses the origin of menstruation as associated with serpents and clairvoyance, and connects castration, menstruation, and clairvoyance to ophidian metamorphosis. The insights of Propp and Lévi-Strauss help relate these symbolic associations back to fairy tales: Propp by claiming that all fairy tale plots are variations of each other and contain metamorphosing characters, and Lévi-Strauss by his famous formula of mythic transformations, which Vaz da Silva applies to describe the "twofold dimension of ontological complexity (two in one) and of identity of opposites (two as one) concerning a dynamic notion of cyclically reversed identity, which spells out metamorphosis" (87). The skins or filth worn by heroines in the Cinderella cycle reveal a bride, who can also be won by killing a dragon, leading to Vaz da Silva's fascinating [End Page 321] suggestion that "The...

Reviewed by: The Hard Facts of the Grimms’ Fairy Tales Donald Haase (bio) The Hard Facts of the Grimms’ Fairy Tales. Maria Tatar . Expanded second edition. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2003. xxxvi + 325 pp. The fairy-tale scholarship that emerged in the 1970s and 1980s is remarkable in both its quantity and quality. Most of this work occurred in the wake of the Grimm bicentennial celebrations in 1985-86, which occasioned a fundamental reassessment of the brothers' tales and generated enormous interest—both scholarly and popular—in the fairy tale. Among the influential works of scholarship that were published during those two decades, I think in particular of the several editions of Grimms' tales edited by Heinz Rölleke; Ruth B. Bottigheimer's Grimms' Bad Girls and Bold Boys(1987); James M. McGlathery's The Brothers Grimm and Folktale(1988); and the many books authored, edited, or translated by Jack Zipes, from Breaking the Magic Spell(1979) and The Trials and Tribulations of Little Red Riding Hood(1983), to The Complete Tales of the Brothers Grimm(1987) and The Brothers Grimm(1988). I also think of Maria Tatar's elegant study of the fairy tale's "hard core," The Hard Facts of the Grimms' Fairy Tales.Published in 1987, The Hard Factsis not only one of the most important studies that emerged from the bicentennial years, it is also, in a broader context, an exemplary work of scholarship. Attesting to the book's enduring values, Princeton University Press has now reissued it in a second expanded edition. When I reviewed The Hard Factsafter its first publication, I emphasized its successful interdisciplinary mix of methods from folklore, literary criticism, social history, and psychoanalysis; its lucid introduction to the fundamental realities of Grimms' collecting, editing, and rewriting; its sound analysis of the Grimms' male and female characters; and Tatar's compelling deconstruction of the Bluebeard tale and its critical reception, which in the meantime has become [End Page 335]one of the most frequently cited passages of her book. My assessment and admiration for this book have not changed. Its arguments and demonstrations remain fresh, and the expanded second edition brings new materials that enhance the book's usefulness, especially in teaching. Specifically, the expanded edition includes a new preface that speaks eloquently to the problems and power of Grimms' fairy tales in our cultural and personal lives and the need to "interrogate and take the measure of their project" (xvii) precisely because of that power. The new edition also offers translations and commentaries for six tales from the 1857 edition of the Kinder- und Hausmärchen("Little Red Riding Hood," "Hansel and Gretel," "The Robber Bridegroom," "Cinderella," "Snow White," and "Thousandfurs"). Both the preface and the commentaries provide exquisitely formulated insights into Grimms' stories and in some cases brought on, at least for me, head-slapping insights into texts that have become all too familiar. For example, Tatar's brief discussion, in the preface, of "Little Red Riding Hood," the alternate ending the Grimms appended to it, and the unusual Swedish variant cited in the brothers' notes to the Kinder- und Hausmärchenprompted me to critically reconsider my understanding of how the Grimms constructed gender in the tale and to rethink how I have been teaching this story. The commentaries to the newly translated tales discuss them in psychological and cultural contexts and compare them to variants in literature, film, and popular culture. Here, too, Tatar offers fresh perspectives. For instance, after pointing out that "Snow White" has inspired fewer adaptations among artists, writers, and filmmakers than tales such as "Cinderella," she concludes that "'Snow White may well be dying a natural death in our culture (235). The expanded edition of The Hard Facts of the Grimms' Fairy Talesenriches an already rich volume of scholarship, one that, because of its clarity and engaging style, appeals to a very wide audience and is frequently used in undergraduate courses. For the scholar and student, the second edition might have been an even richer resource if the new preface and commentaries had provided references to existing scholarship on the topics that Tatar presents so engagingly—for example, on film adaptations...

Fairy Tale Transformation: The Pied Piper Theme in Australian Fiction

Reviewed by: Marvelous Transformations: An Anthology of Fairy Tales and Contemporary Critical Perspectives ed. by Christine A. Jones, Jennifer Schacker Johanna Denzin (bio) Marvelous Transformations: An Anthology of Fairy Tales and Contemporary Critical Perspectives. Edited by Christine A. Jones and Jennifer Schacker . Peterborough, ON : Broadview Press , 2013 . This volume’s strength lies in both its range of primary source stories and the span of secondary criticism included. With their selection of texts, Jones and Schacker have also attempted to situate fairy tale studies in a broader interdisciplinary context that emphasizes the relationship between literary history and folklore history, particularly field-based oral storytelling (16). As they point out in their introduction, students are often locked into traditional interpretations of classic fairy tales that reduce the stories to tidy moral messages. “Little Red Riding Hood,” for example, is seen as a warning against talking to strangers, or about the need for young girls on the edge of sexual maturity to listen to their mothers. To help dislodge these more limited readings and to model how they suggest the tales within the volume should be read, Jones and Schacker explicate “Little Red Riding Hood,” emphasizing the importance of separating the different layers of the tale: the social context in which a story is created and performed; its political or ideological reception; the larger generic context in which a tale circulates; and the particular textual form and details of the individual story (25). Thus, when “Little Red Riding Hood” is read in the original Charles Perrault version (“Le Petit Chaperon Rouge” [1697]), the moral attached to the end of Perrault’s tale clearly situates the story as a cautionary message for young female courtiers. In fact, as Jones and Schacker suggest, the moral of the story may be that it is impossible for these young women to avoid the social and sexual politics of the court and therefore being devoured by the predatory male courtiers. Even in the differing Grimm version (“Rotkäppchen” [1857]), Jones and Schacker argue, when the language of the story is analyzed closely the text suggests how important it is for Little Red Riding Hood and her Grandmother (and females in general) to be able to master and to control verbal discourse in order to navigate the dangers of the world (and random wolves). This is far from the simpler message that little girls need to listen to the advice of their mothers not to stray off the forest path. Following the introduction, the body of primary texts is divided into five broad time periods: “Early Written Traditions”; “Early Print Traditions”; “Romanticism to the Fin De Siècle”; “Modern / Postmodern Tales”; and “Contemporary Transcriptions and Translations.” The editors comment that they selected stories that figure in current fairy tale scholarship, then arranged them chronologically instead of by national tradition or theme, with the intention of highlighting each story’s cultural and textual uniqueness (36–38). Within these divisions, Jones and Schacker include a brief introduction to each tale that attempts to clarify its relationship to the larger world of fairy tale studies. These pieces are [End Page 456] somewhat less successful than their commentary in the general introduction. While it is likely that Jones and Schacker were constrained by space limitations, there is some inconsistency in the amount of background information included for each entry. For example, the introduction to the first story, the Egyptian tale of “The Two Brothers,” offers little useful discussion to contextualize it, although the notes appearing throughout the story do help to clarify specific points of the narrative. Background information also could have been elaborated for the Straparola stories. In general, the notes accompanying the tales are useful and extend the introductory material, although some stories—perhaps those the editors felt were more self-explanatory—have few or no notes at all. My own students, however, would benefit from as much background information as possible to help construct their own close readings from texts that are drawn from so many different historical periods and cultural traditions. Jones and Schacker also emphasize that they had selected stories that figure in current fairy tale / folktale scholarship; to this end, it would have been extremely useful to...

Previous articleNext article No AccessA Fairy Tale from before Fairy Tales: Egbert of Liège's "De puella a lupellis seruata" and the Medieval Background of "Little Red Riding Hood"Jan M. ZiolkowskiJan M. Ziolkowski Search for more articles by this author PDFPDF PLUS Add to favoritesDownload CitationTrack CitationsPermissionsReprints Share onFacebookTwitterLinkedInRedditEmail SectionsMoreDetailsFiguresReferencesCited by Speculum Volume 67, Number 3Jul., 1992 The journal of the Medieval Academy of America Article DOIhttps://doi.org/10.2307/2863656 Views: 34Total views on this site Citations: 9Citations are reported from Crossref Copyright 1992 Medieval Academy of AmericaPDF download Crossref reports the following articles citing this article:Miriam Wray Kleidung und Altersthematik in „Rotkäppchen“, „Aschenputtel“ und ihren literarischen Adaptionen, The German Quarterly 94, no.22 (Jun 2021): 197–207.https://doi.org/10.1111/gequ.12176Jamshid J. Tehrani Descent with Imagination: Oral Traditions as Evolutionary Lineages, (Aug 2020): 273–289.https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-46190-4_14Jamshid J. Tehrani, Julien d’Huy Phylogenetics Meets Folklore: Bioinformatics Approaches to the Study of International Folktales, (Sep 2016): 91–114.https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-39445-9_6Edirlei Soares de Lima, Bruno Feijó, Marco Antonio Casanova, Antonio L. Furtado Storytelling variants based on semiotic relations, Entertainment Computing 17 (Nov 2016): 31–44.https://doi.org/10.1016/j.entcom.2016.08.003Jamshid Tehrani, Quan Nguyen, Teemu Roos Oral fairy tale or literary fake? Investigating the origins of Little Red Riding Hood using phylogenetic network analysis, Digital Scholarship in the Humanities 31, no.33 (Jun 2015): 611–636.https://doi.org/10.1093/llc/fqv016Edirlei Soares de Lima, Antonio L. Furtado, Bruno Feijó Storytelling Variants: The Case of Little Red Riding Hood, (Dec 2015): 286–300.https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-24589-8_22Jamshid J. Tehrani, R. Alexander Bentley The Phylogeny of Little Red Riding Hood, PLoS ONE 8, no.1111 (Nov 2013): e78871.https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0078871 Bibliography, (Nov 2007): 408–470.https://doi.org/10.1002/9780470996775.biblioJuha-Antti Lamberg, Kalle Pajunen Beyond the metaphor: The morphology of organizational decline and turnaround, Human Relations 58, no.88 (Aug 2005): 947–980.https://doi.org/10.1177/0018726705058499

Type O Negative’s ‘Wolf Moon (including Zoanthropic Paranoia)’ seems to be a melodic ode to lascivious werewolves or to sexual intercourse during menstruation, which is transformative, allowing participation to channel animalistic instincts. Subject to more critical examination, ‘Wolf Moon (including Zoanthropic Paranoia)’ can also be presented as a contemporary incarnation of the ‘Little Red Riding Hood’ myth. Both contain the same themes: the stigmatization of eroticism, reclamation of agency, along with the nuances of gender identity and representation. Any Women’s Studies programme student is attuned to how storytelling and imagery of those within the story influence gender roles and their perceptions. Real-life themes are undoubtedly found within fairy tales as well, with a special emphasis on how women who do not remain in their proper place are punished because of it. In ‘Wolf Moon (including Zoanthropic Paranoia)’, the woman is rewarded for those experiences, by being permitted to indulge in her darkest desires. Meeting (or meating) a wolf that is hungry for you is nothing to fear in Type O Negative’s version of ‘Little Red Riding Hood’. Instead, it is the hallmark of a ‘great day’, and is something that should be celebrated. As ‘Little Red Riding Hood’ traverses onward throughout the western society’s cultural consciousness, one can only hope for further metal music acts interpretations of this infamous fairy tale. Representation matters, and the nuances of how the female gender has been portrayed throughout the centuries as reflected in the re-telling of a fairy tale is a subject that warrants a closer look through metal music and gender.

Acknowledgments Introduction: Modernism's Fairy Tales 1 Turning Back the Covers: Fairy Tales in the Modern Age * A Brief History of the Fairy Tale * The Politics of Authentication * The Perils of Commodification * The Possibilities of Transformation 2 James Joyce: The Fashionable Fairy Tale * Joyce and the Celtic Revival * Objecting and Subjecting to Irish Nationalism * Mirrored Identities * Cinderella and Stephen Dedalus * Snow White and Gerty MacDowell 3 Virginia Woolf: A Slipper of One's Own * Mrs Dalloway and 'Sleeping Beauty' * To the Lighthouse and the Lessons of Childhood * Woolf's Fairy-Tale Inheritance * The Influence of Lady Ritchie * Orlando: Dragging Cinderella into 1928 4 Djuna Barnes: Wolves in Sheep's Clothing * 'Little Red Riding Hood' and the Uses of Consumer Culture * Ladies Almanack and the Sexual Economics of Lesbos * Families, Fairy Tales, and Zadel Barnes Conclusion: Slipping Out from Between the Sheets Notes References Index