Picturebooks as adaptations of fairy tales

Abstract

Fairy tale illustrations help to keep the stories up to date, offering a commercially attractive combination of the old and the new. Fairy tale picture books and illustrated collections are steady sellers that many publishing houses actively commission. Fairy tales pose particular challenges to illustrators, in addition to the iconic images that new artists have to negotiate or engage with when they embark on illustrating fairy tales. Countless fairy tale picturebooks adopt a romantic and detailed, sometimes even photographic style, and set the tales in a pseudo-medieval context. The fairy tale picturebooks discussed earlier all rely on a complete traditional or duplicate fairy tale text. In addition, a variety of postmodern picturebooks based on fairy tales has appeared, particularly since the 1990s. Fairy tale picturebooks – whether in the form of duplicates or postmodern rewritings – enter into a visual dialogue with the long traditions of both fairy tales and the various illustrations for these tales.