Special Issue of Studies in Costume & Performance 7.2: “Costume and Fairy Tales”

Abstract

395 NOTES AND CORRESPONDENCE in unlikely places, as in the early days of a genre once thought to be the domain of men, and in research and teaching both the history of science fiction and the interrelations between feminism and popular culture. The collection reprints “Letter of the Twenty Fourth Century” (1929), “Men with Wings (1929), “Women with Wings” (1930), “The Conquest of Gola” (1931), “The Fall of Mercury” (1935), “The Human Pets of Mars” (1936), and Stone’s speech from Balticon, “The Day of the Pulps” (1974). I could not have completed the collection without the cooperation and support of the author’s surviving family members, particularly her son Donald Silberberg, whose test of me as a researcher required explaining how I had used his mother’s role-reversal title story in teaching College Writing. 80% of the male students had argued that the author was a woman, while an equal percentage of the female students had argued just as persuasively that the author must have been a man. “My mother would have liked that,” he said, and our collaborative relationship began (5). As a Jewish scholar and multiculturalist researching in the field of ethnic literatures of the United States, I became interested in the work of this Jewish American writer, who lived between 1905 and 1991. Her work appeared with no ethnic markings, as did work of other Jewish sf writers, such as Judith Merril. Born a Rubenstein and living her adult married life as a Silberberg, Stone created characters who were non-Jewish and lived completely Gentile lives. Like Stanley G. Weinbaum’s Ham Hammond in “Parasite Planet” and “The Lotus Eaters,” Dr. Daniel Scott in “The Adaptive Ultimate,” and Captain Harrison and Dick Jarvis in “Valley of Dreams,” Stone’s characters were consistently identified by Gentile, non-Jewish names. For example, in “Men with Wings,” Kennedy is the narrating character. Nevertheless, many issues presented and themes discussed had to do with concerns facing Jews at the time, such as breeding the Aryan superior race, and the questioning of the dual loyalty of a race that had a national identity elsewhere but took posts in American government. The latter could have been an imaginary extrapolation from the known (the Gentile fear of employing Jews in the civil service) to the unknown (what would happen if somebody bred a superior race on earth). By the 1920s, Jewish immigration had slowed down enough for a generation to have established roots in America, but it was clear some were still feeling alien, even having engaged in the struggle for Americanization reflected in earlier Jewish-American literature such as Anzia’s Bread Givers (1925). Although Stone’s work on a story-by-story basis has entered the debates concerning gender in the field, perhaps this collection will diversify that dimension into considering the Jewish impact.—Batya Weinbaum, Editor, Femspec, Faculty of English, American Public University Special Issue of Studies in Costume & Performance 7.2: “Costume and Fairy Tales.” Our special issue invites full-research articles (4000–5000 words), visual essays (1000–2500 words with emphasis on visual evidence), research reports (2500–4000 words), analyses of research documents, and ‘in- 396 SCIENCE FICTION STUDIES, VOLUME 48 (2021) conversations’ with artists, designers, or scholars (2000–4000 words), as well as reviews of events and new publications. While the relationship between fashion and the fairy tale has been examined in the fields of fashion studies and fairy-tale criticism, the concept of costume in the fairy tale has not yet been sufficiently explored. We believe that an interdisciplinary, cross-cultural approach to this topic will offer fresh insight into the fields of costume studies, fairy-tale studies, performance studies, and (more broadly) studies of art, narrative, and culture across time, space, and discipline. Costume plays an important part both in traditional fairy tales and in their adaptations in diverse media forms: theatre, ballet, opera, and musicals, and also film, visual art, manga, theme parks, video games, and digital and social media. Clothes worn by characters in fairy tales function according to the internal narrative logic that constitutes and organizes the storyworld, defining and transforming the wearers’ identities and social contexts. The ubiquitous persistence of...