From Folk Tales to Popular Culture: Poaching and Relevance in the Process of History

Abstract

In this paper the author examines the concept of relevance and its relationship with poaching, a popular culture activity and a practice detectable in the transition of oral folk tales to literary fairytales, and in the further modi- fication of the genre of fairytales by feminist writers. The author illustrates the practice of poaching with the different versions and variants of the Little Red Riding Hood story, written in different historical eras for different authorial purposes. In the examination of the concept of poaching and relevance, the au- thors relies on the theories of de Certeau, Fiske and Jenkins as well as Zipes.