Briar Rose Research Articles

Fairy Tales of Genocide: Processing the Holocaust by Recontextualising Fairy-Tale Narratives

This article explores the intersection of fairy tales and Holocaust narratives, exploring the emerging trend of presenting Holocaust tales within the fairy-tale genre as a societal response to grappling with Holocaust trauma. Examining linguistic and ethical approaches in works by authors Liz Braswell, Louise Murphy, and Jane Yolen, it poses a central question: does merging Holocaust and fairy-tale narratives enhance understanding or hinder respectful remembrance? The article scrutinises subliminal storytelling in Holocaust tales, highlighting varied authorial approaches, from Braswell's cryptic social conflict to Murphy's and Yolen's use of vague references within a Holocaust-aware context. Exploring how Holocaust tales navigate the balance between fantasy and historical context, it analyses recontextualisation in the works of Braswell and Murphy. Braswell's ‘Beauty and the Beast’ engages with social conflict and history by transforming the curse, while Murphy's ‘Hansel and Gretel’ reframes the oven as a symbol of safety. Additionally, the article addresses the ethical dimensions of representing the Holocaust in children's fiction, emphasising the use of fantasy to enhance accessibility and emotional engagement. Analysing works like Yolen's ‘Briar Rose’ and Braswell's ‘Beauty and the Beast’ illustrates how these narratives navigate historical representation complexities, aiming to preserve awareness and prompt moral reflections. The article argues that fantasy elements not only render the Holocaust accessible to contemporary readers but also provide a unique avenue for emotional engagement, transcending the limitations of historical facts.

‘About the Tangle of the Rose’: Thinking with the Fin‐de‐Siècle Tendril

‘[It] transported me a thousand miles from London, to a thousand years from the age of Mr. Gladstone’, recalled Robert de la Sizeranne of Edward Burne‐Jones's Briar Rose series (1884–90). This essay argues, on the contrary, that the paintings were closer to contemporary concerns than Sizeranne allowed. In Burne‐Jones's briar, we find a remarkable example of one of the late nineteenth century's most promiscuous and ambiguous motifs: the tendril. Perhaps unexpectedly, this ornamental motif was at the centre of fin‐de‐siècle debates about time, capitalist expansion, and imperialism. In visual art, philosophy, and art history, the tendril figured anxieties about where Europe was heading. Tracing its movement through Burne‐Jones's canvases into texts by Henri Bergson and Alois Riegl, and decorative art by Victor Horta and William Morris, this essay contends that the tendril traverses a shared, but fragile, trans‐European imperial landscape at the end of the nineteenth century.

Structures All the Way Down: Literary Methods and the Detail

Abstract This essay makes the case that most methods in literary studies explicitly privilege the detail but covertly depend on structures. The article turns to structuralism, specifically to the debate between Vladimir Propp and Claude Lévi-Strauss about the role of the detail, for a method that keeps structures in view, even while focusing on details. Suggesting that structuralist methods could usefully reshape the teaching of literature now, the essay reads two novels that both depend on and depart from traditional fairy-tale patterns: Jane Yolen’s Briar Rose (1992) and Helen Oyeyemi’s Boy, Snow, Bird (2014).

Imagery, Irony, and Transcendence in Carl Jonas Love Almqvist's The Queen's Tiara

Imagery, Irony, and Transcendence in Carl Jonas Love Almqvist's <i>The Queen's Tiara</i>

The Bone Spindle by Leslie Vedder

Reviewed by: The Bone Spindle by Leslie Vedder April Spisak Vedder, Leslie The Bone Spindle. Razorbill, 2022 [416p] Trade ed. ISBN 9780593325827 $18.99 E-book ed. ISBN 9780593325834 $10.99 Reviewed from digital galleys R Gr. 8-10 Sleeping Beauty is the breathtakingly handsome prince, Briar Rose; other than the gender swap, the rest of his story is familiar—he and his kingdom have been sleeping for 100 years after being cursed by a witch, and it's going to take an outsider to set things right. Enter Filore, an extremely reluctant hero who has her own stuff going on (she's also cursed by an ex-partner) and did not need to find out she is fated to wake the prince. Destiny is destiny, however, and Fi finds herself, and her treasure-hunting partner, Shane, moving toward the place where Briar sleeps. At the same time, Shane, the daughter of a War King, is running away from her own demons, striving to carve out an existence that she determines, outside of the expectations of others. Both women fall in love, Fi with Briar, who appears regularly in her sleep as a sardonic, supportive companion, and Shane with Red, a mystery woman who somehow keeps crossing paths with them on their journey. Indeed, love is at the center of this novel: what do we owe to those we love, when do their needs become our own, and how do we retain individuality when our hearts are tied to others. It's a thoughtful, albeit breathy exploration, and Shane and Fi are different enough in how they fall in love that romance buffs will likely be pleased to have two love stories within the same cover. The conclusion is frustratingly unresolved as a sequel is obviously anticipated, but that is a fairly minor quibble with an otherwise splendid upheaval of a familiar fairy tale. Copyright © 2021 The Board of Trustees of the University of Illinois

Rewards and punishments as developing gendered ideologies in Grimm Brothers’ Briar Rose

Fairy tale literature can be identified as didactic, as it shares moralistic and educational ideals through its characters and themes. Intending to instruct, fairy tales relate specific moralistic concepts, indicating accepted and unaccepted conduct. Researchers have postulated the correlation between a fairy tale and its social context, considering that these tales include contrived elements specific to the societal structure from which they originate. Specific to this research is the connection between a fairy tale and the gendered ideals held within the society as noted in Grimm Brothers’ Briar Rose . The version analysed in this article is the Collins Classics collection of the Grimm Brothers’ tales, which was published in 2013. This tale reflects content which perpetuates and supports the patriarchal expectations of the 19th-century Germany. The Grimm Brothers’ treatment of the princess, 13th fairy and prince reinforce gender-specific roles for men and women. The rewards and punishments earned by the characters mould not only their behaviours, but also potentially the behaviours of the 19th-century readers. This article analyses the behavioural consequences faced by the characters in Briar Rose , with particular consideration of how these responses convey gender ideals to the readers, and how these influence their own subsequent behaviour and expectations.

The Silence of Fragmentation

Holocaust literature is a challenging space in which to write, seeking toa convey an event that cannot truly be represented in words: the systematic destruction of millions of lives, an estimated 1.5 million of which were children who were permanently silenced in the concentration camps. Young adult authors have the added challenge of creating texts that convey the trauma of the Holocaust in ways that are accessible to teenage readers, attempting to reconcile a moral duty to historical accuracy with the desire for an engaging, empathetic novel. This article addresses the evolving use of silence and fragmentation to represent the trauma of the Holocaust in three young adult novels from the last thirty-five years: Jane Yolen’s Briar Rose (1992), Marianne Fredriksson’s Simon och ekarna (Simon and the Oaks, 1985), and Sharon Hart-Green’s Come Back for Me (2017). As this event recedes further into history, historical knowledge of it may be in decline, while anti-Semitism is still prevalent. The Holocaust is something about which we must continue to speak, but now we must do so in different ways. Building on the work of Lydia Kokkola and Leona Toker, this article demonstrates how silence has been used to represent the trauma of the Holocaust as we become increasingly removed from the event. If a traumatic event is understood as it returns to a victim in shards of memories, then fragmentation can be used to recreate the experience for a reader, representing the chaos as opposed to attempting to order it. By writing in a form rife with silent gaps in narrative, knowledge, and understanding, young adult authors can select that which they reveal to their readers according to present historical knowledge while simultaneously mimicking the chaotic, fractured experience of trauma itself. Ultimately, that which is not said becomes as powerful as that which is.

Edward Burne-Jones, edited by Alison Smith

Reviewed by: Edward Burne-Jones by Alison Smith Mark Stocker (bio) Edward Burne-Jones, edited by Alison Smith; pp. 224. London: Tate Publishing, 2018, £40.00, £23.00 paper. Although Alison Smith’s edited volume, Edward Burne-Jones, which accompanied a major Tate Britain exhibition between 2018 and 2019, is noticeably shorter than Edward Burne-Jones: Victorian Artist-Dreamer (1998), it provides equally valuable and updated insight into a figure regarded by John Pope-Hennessy as “one of the three greatest British artists of all time” (Learning to Look: My Life in Art [Doubleday, 1991], 13). While it sensibly refrains from duplicating the biographical emphasis of the magisterial accounts by Penelope Fitzgerald and Fiona MacCarthy, it can be appreciated primarily as a book rather than a multiple-entry catalog. There are nine chapters, six of which relate more closely to the exhibits, examining such themes as draftsmanship, series paintings, and design. The overview by Elizabeth Prettejohn confirms her formidable reputation as a thoughtful revisionist of Victorian art, stating boldly what more timid apologists had till now tentatively or dimly thought. The term apologist is used deliberately; it still appears tiresomely necessary to defend Burne-Jones from the brickbats of prominent mainstream media critics who cannot take him, or indeed Pre-Raphaelitism, seriously, reflecting the Englishness of damning English art. Prettejohn argues that Burne-Jones was sui generis and asks rhetorically, “Is there any other important artist of the nineteenth century who received a university education and never attended an art school? Is there, indeed, any other artist of the entire western tradition . . . who was educated entirely as an intellectual and not as a practitioner?” (14). Roger Fry may appear a valid rival, but after graduating from Cambridge he undertook more sustained training, and even the most ardent Bloomsburyite would not consider him an artist of the same caliber. Perhaps a better candidate is Burne-Jones’s lifelong friend, the architecturally trained William Morris. Both resolved to become artists through sheer force of will and before they knew that they had any special talent for it. For both men the vocation filled a vital intellectual and emotional void left by their abandonment of formal Christian beliefs. As Prettejohn states, “exact thinking . . . may have destroyed [Burne-Jones’s] belief in any particular doctrine, but it gave him an analytical habit that is crucial to understanding his art” (16). This helps explain why he painted what he did, resulting in a more intellectual art than almost any of his contemporaries, French impressionists and Victorian subject painters alike. Indeed, the outcome is something culturally closer to the comparative mythology and comparative religion of James Frazer, Jane Ellen Harrison, and Gilbert Murray. Prettejohn even offers the persuasive claim that “Burne-Jones’s pictorial storytelling seems to epitomise what we now call ‘intertextuality’” (17). [End Page 138] Burne-Jones’s lack of conventional training was reflected in how he blurred media. This could be interpreted negatively, as when his archrival James Whistler wittily quipped, “didn’t I always say that the man knew nothing about painting. . . . They take his oils for water-colours and his water-colours for oils” (31). Yet for Burne-Jones’s admirers it is precisely “they” who are at fault and miss out on the dry, hard, otherworldly beauty of his crafted creations. In her essay on Burne-Jones’s techniques, Alison Smith answers Whistler by addressing the innovatively “intermedial nature of Burne-Jones’s art” (30). Smith and others stress the point—also emphasized by the Tate Britain installation— that Burne-Jones approached his art “as a form of craft rather than a professionalised activity” (23). Even major paintings that clearly asked to be considered as fine art also presented themselves as akin to wall furnishings, such as The Legend of the Briar Rose (1885–90) installed in the saloon at Buscot Park. The Burne-Jones aesthetic lent itself to astonishingly versatile cross-media application, and here he ranks with John Flaxman before him and Eric Gill after as underrated British geniuses of Gesamtkunstwerk, works of art combining multiple forms in one. Thus a further chapter besides Suzanne Fagence Cooper’s “Burne-Jones as a Designer,” might have been desirable. In...

Sleeping Beauty

The interest in fairy tales grew strongly over the course of the nineteenth century, particularly in Germany, the birthplace of Frans Stracké (1820-1898). Renowned artists made illustrations for popular publications of fairy tales and in the middleof the century characters from fairy tales also appeared in paintings and sculptures. The sculptor Frans Stracké was inspired by this development and in the eighteen-sixties created a Sleeping Beauty and a Snow White. He may have chosen these designs because the sleeping figure offers greater sculptural possibilities, for example in funeral art. He showed Sleeping Beauty at the precise moment she falls asleep, after she had pricked her finger on a spindle. Stracké followed the fairy tale by the Brothers Grimm from 1812, in which the ill-fated event was predicted during the celebration of Sleeping Beauty’s birth. Sleeping Beauty (also known as Briar Rose) was precisely the sort of subject Stracké preferred: he excelled in making genre-like sculpture of a very high standard. This was little appreciated in the Netherlands, whereas in France and Italy practitioners of this type of sculpture enjoyed considerable success. Stracké is credited with introducing contemporary developments in European sculpture into the Netherlands; Sleeping Beauty is a relatively early and typical example.

Reading Games in Auschwitz: Play in Holocaust Youth Literature

Near the end of Jane Yolen's young adult Holocaust novel Briar Rose (1992), a young Polish woman says to an older storyteller, You like to play (229). The statement is not a compliment; it is an accusation, a charge of callous impropriety and blithe indifference toward the sober facts of the Holocaust. Yolen's novel is excavating personal histories from the ruins of the genocide, and play appears to have no role in such inquiries. But the text's American protagonist, whose family history the storyteller has just recounted, swiftly reverses the charge: I think you like to play too, she says with some pique to the young Pole, a friend who helps the heroine unearth her complicated ancestry. The penchant for play in this context may be shameful, but it is something the characters share, a common predilection that neither figure can resist. However, the Polish friend parries the protagonist's reproach. She offers justification for the informed use of play in rehearsing tragic history: If one does not play games, she says, then there is too much to weep about (230). For the chastened individual who plays with sensitivity tinged with historical consciousness, games can be a vital prophylactic against the dolorous tears brought on by too much knowledge of the past. We play so as to avoid cry- ing. In this particular view, the ludic power of play inures one just enough to face the traumatic past without succumbing to a threnody of despair. This passage points to a surprising theme in the corpus of juvenile lit- erature on the Holocaust: many of its texts focus, incongruously, on play. Games and play 1 appear with astonishing frequency in works of fiction the Holocaust for older children and young adolescents. My sample draws on post-Holocaust fiction written for readers aged nine through fourteen, the late elementary school and junior high school grades in which texts the event are frequently taught. Throughout this body of work, games and play serve as the linchpin either for surviving the genocide or for trans-

Magical Transports and Transformations:

ABSTRACTHolocaust fiction and film for young audiences constitute a representational and pedagogical dilemma. Such narrative conventions as fantasy and fairy tale elements offer accessibility for young audiences to learn about the brutal and incomprehensible extremes of the Holocaust. However, they may also undermine the catastrophe's grim historicity. Examining Jane Yolen's Holocaust novel The Devil's Arithmetic and its film adaptation alongside her novel Briar Rose, we address the following question: do uses of fantasy techniques such as magical transports and transformations soften, sanitize, and inevitably sentimentalize Holocaust history, or do those techniques express important historical knowledge?

Steeped in Lore

Steeped in Lore Cay Dollerup (bio) The Grimm Reader: The Classic Tales of the Brothers Grimm. Maria Tatar, ed. and trans.; Introduction by A. S. Byatt. W. W. Norton. http://books.wwnorton.com. 325 pages; paper, $16.95. The brothers Grimm published the first volume of their Children and Household Tales, now known as the Grimm Fairytales, shortly before Christmas in 1812 at the same time that Napoleon's fatigued army beat its retreat from Russia. The second volume of Tales appeared in 1815, the year that saw Napoleon's final defeat. Jacob Grimm was in the service of Napoleon's brother, King Jérôme of Westphalia, and in this capacity he was present at meetings of the council of state where he was probably an interpreter. From this international vantage point, he observed how the wars wrought havoc in Europe. There was incipient nationalism, and a growing recognition that the core of "German" cultural identity was to be found in the German past and notably in folklore as expressed in ballads, legends, and tales. Steeped in old German lore, the brothers Grimm had begun to collect folktales around 1807, partly in order to create a basis for a "history of poetry" and partly to save the tales from oblivion. Whereas Napoleon brought destruction to many countries, the brothers Grimm succeeded both in establishing a scholarly foundation for folkloristic research and committing to paper and the general public the tales that bear their name. The Tales were by no means an instant success. It required translations into Danish (1816, 1817, 1823), Dutch (1820), and, above all, English (1823) to make Wilhelm publish a Small Edition for children in Germany. It comprised only 50 tales that primarily belonged to the fairytale genre, and this selection appealed to large audiences of delighted children in Germany and abroad. Although both brothers initially collected the tales, it was Wilhelm Grimm who gave them the form that we know today by introducing, over a period of 40 years, numerous changes that were inspired by his reading aloud of the stories. Most translations of the Grimm Tales offer a selection of the "core" fairytales such as "Snow White," "Briar Rose," and "The Wolf and the Seven Little Goats." But in this collection, Maria Tatar offers the general reader a unique insight into the "realities" of the genuine Grimm Tales by printing some of the controversial and barbaric ones. Her aim is to make for a more nuanced perception of the two brothers. She promises that readers "will find here a hotline to stories that hiss and cackle with narrative energy, to narratives that have migrated from nineteenth century Germany to other times and places." She has selected 46 tales and legends for children from the Grimm volume of 210 stories. They have been translated expertly and fluently and include an adaption of the German punctuation and word order. She succeeds in this, and all tales are well suited for reading aloud. In contrast to most edited translations for children that are often adapted and censored, Tatar renders the contents adequately. Before we condemn re-writing in translation, it should be borne in mind that in the oral tradition from which most of the Grimm tales ultimately derive, no one owns a story. It is only in the narration that the tale lives, and only then does it belong to the speaker. Every narrator in the chain can add as well as leave out features, passages, characters, and crucial events, and perhaps create a tale with another basic theme from the same mould. Translators of tales are merely links in the narrative chain, and their produce is consumed with or without changes by readers, parents and grandparents, listeners, and children, who are free to summarize the tales they heard any way they can. This edition comes with scholarly comments and is therefore to be taken more seriously, but at the same time, it is not to be judged by any other standards than those set by Tatar herself. I believe the original's "Hochzeit" in "Cinderella" as a "festival" or "ball" since the word "Hochzeit" is here used in the sense also recorded in the Grimm...

“ Sleeping Beauty ” in Chelmno : Jane Yolen’s Briar Rose or Breaking the Spell of Silence

This article analyses Jane Yolen’s Briar Rose from the perspective of trauma studies as a novelistic transposition of “ Sleeping Beauty ” in the context of the Holocaust. It argues that the fairy tale fulfils a key psychological and even existential role for the fictional survivor of the extermination camp, but also a pedagogical, moral and political one through the figure of the cowitness central to the economy of the novel. Through Becca’s recovery of the biographical elements underlying her grandmother’s retelling of the story, Yolen shows how the fairy tale can serve to communicate traumatic personal memories and transmit collective cultural knowledge to counter the disappearance of first-hand witnesses.

“Smite this Sleeping World Awake”: Edward Burne-Jones and &lt;em&gt;The Legend of the Briar Rose&lt;/em&gt;

Challenging entrenched preconceptions about the supposed escapism and conservatism of Edward Burne-Jones's art, this paper seeks to establish his monumental painted series, "The Legend of the Briar Rose," as a fundamentally radical and confrontational work. Critics have long viewed it as an endorsement of sleepy stasis, antithetical to the political activism espoused by his friend William Morris. By unraveling the intertwining themes of the series -- the transformative dream vision, artistic labor, the decorative mode, and social egalitarianism -- the "Briar Rose" series is revealed instead to be dramatization of the struggle for personal, social, artistic, and even environmental awakening.

&lt;em&gt;William Morris and Edward Burne-Jones: Interlacings&lt;/em&gt;, by Caroline Arscot

Reviewed by: William Morris and Edward Burne-Jones: Interlacings Kathleen O’Neill Sims (bio) William Morris and Edward Burne-Jones: Interlacings, by Caroline Arscott; pp. 260. New Haven and London: Yale University Press for the Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art, 2008, $75.00, £40.00. Caroline Arscott, Senior Lecturer at the Courtauld Institute, offers students of William Morris and Edward Burne-Jones an engaging, if eccentrically speculative, study of the aesthetic relationship between the two artists. Arscott opens her introductory chapter by articulating a dialectic between the artists’ timeless “lyrical” images and the time-bound textual “narratives” in which those images have their contexts. She posits Morris’s and Burne-Jones’s fascination with imaginary body morphologies, psychic and [End Page 152] physical spaces, and their troubled utopian desires as crucial to a full understanding of the expressive urgencies coursing through the fine arts, literature, and decorative arts of the second half of the nineteenth century. This study alternates between chapters devoted to works or clusters of works by each artist. Arscott’s first chapter, “Morris: The Gymnasium,” seeks to illuminate the convergences between Morris’s early wallpaper design and fitness theory, harkening back to his and Burne-Jones’s Oxford days when both would frequent the gym of Archibald MacLaren, who was to give Burne-Jones his first commission designing illustrations for a book of fairy ballads. Arscott argues that as Morris grew older, his designs relied increasingly on two-dimensional motifs evacuated largely of negative space. Arscott compares Morris’s practice of beefing up the patterns of his designs at the expense of the background to the tearing down and building up of soft tissue to create lean muscle mass in order to escape bodily decay and death, linking both to experiments in Aesthetic art. In this same vein, chapter 3 examines Burne-Jones’s unfinished Perseus series (1875–88), undertaken in response to Morris’s robust designs. Arscott deploys the under-appreciated Didier Anzieu’s psychoanalytic theory of the “skin ego,” which, in both pre- and post-Oedipal dispensation, experiences the overwhelming external world of reality effects across its fragile and permeable surface. Whereas the alarmingly stout Morris creates strapping acanthus vines and loud chrysanthemums, the painfully thin Burne-Jones paints a vulnerable, thin-skinned hero who appears to have forgotten his shoes. The armor he creates for Perseus provides a much-needed exoskeleton for his mythological protagonist. Arscott’s elaborations on this seeming half-man-half-machine says a lot about Burne-Jones’s forlorn and feeble construction of masculinity. But then she overshoots her lovely insight that Perseus is a time traveler (psychic or art-historical, she does not say). Her comparison of Perseus to the Terminator is modestly entertaining, but only just—while her illustrations do intrigue, correlation is not causation. Arscott also fails to provide any convincing evidence that Burne-Jones drew his inspiration for armature from Victorian weapons manufacture. Perseus’s metallic skin owes far more to the Hermes of Andrea Mantegna’s Parnassus (1497) than to a proto-cyborgian vision. Moreover, much of his armor features avian elements, as if the magic of Hermes’s slippers had enchanted even his most obsidian of garments. Designed for Arthur Balfour’s dining room, this series was to have included, like The Legend of Briar Rose series (1870–95), in situ panels encased in wooden frames with gilded gesso ornamentation and set off by text. Chapters 4 and 5 continue to explore the dialogue between the two artists by analyzing Morris’s wallpaper designs from the 1870s onwards alongside Burne-Jones’s Briar Rose series. Here Arscott explores how and why these artists (Morris more than Burne-Jones) chose to erase the boundary between foreground and background, as well as between fine and decorative arts, in seeming anticipation of modern concerns with space, image, and function. She also examines dead space in Morris’s textiles and wallpaper designs, describing how their interlocking patterns, color blocking, and strong vertical repetitions convey the harmonies of the natural world and promote a green vision of a human community, while simultaneously reminding the spectator of his mortality and subjection to the cycles of life and...

Index - Volume 23

Campbell, N., ‘Much unseen is also here’: John Brinckerhoff Jackson’s new western roadscapes, pp. 217–231 Crockatt, R., No common ground? Islam, anti-Americanism and the United States, pp. 125–142 Epstein, J., Under America’s sign: two nineteenth-century British readings, pp. 95–109 Fabbrini, S., Layers of anti-Americanism: Americanization, American unilateralism and anti-Americanism in a European perspective, pp. 79–94 Ickstadt, H., Uniting a divided nation: Americanism and anti-Americanism in post-war Germany, pp. 157–170 Kusnír, J., Subversion of myths: high and low cultures in Donald Barthelme’s Snow White and Robert Coover’s Briar Rose, pp. 31–49 Loren, S., What are the implications of the virtual for the human? An analytical ethics of identity in pop culture narratives, pp. 173–185 Mitchell, R., The Confidence Man: performing the magic of modernity, pp. 51–62 Morley, C., The Bard of American domesticity. John Updike reconsidered in terms of transnationalism, pp. 187–200 Panay, A., From Little Big Man to little green men: the captivity scenario in American culture, pp. 201–216 Pells, R., From modernism to the movies. The globalization of American culture in the twentieth century, pp. 143–155 Ryan, D., Framing September 11: Rhetorical Device and Photographic Opinion, pp. 5–20 Ryan, D., Americanisation and anti-Americanism at the periphery. Nicaragua and the Sandinistas, pp. 111–124 Selby, N., Desiring texts: the erotics of domestic space in the poetry of Lyn Hejinian and Rosmarie Waldrop, pp. 21–29

Subversion of myths: high and low cultures in Donald Barthelme’s Snow White and Robert Coover’s Briar Rose

This paper analyses Donald Barthelme’s and Robert Coover’s postmodern novels Snow White and Briar Rose and the way both authors, especially through the use of parody and irony, undermine traditional genres of popular literature and, at the same time, give both an intramural critique of traditional narrative techniques (and the vision of the world they produce) and the extramural critique of consumerism and popular culture. In addition to this, with the analysis of Coover’s novel the emphasis is on the imagery of dreams and dreaming understood as the manifestation of undermining of some aspects of Freudian theories.

Return with New Complexities: Robert Coover's Briar Rose

Postmodernist fiction usually addresses certain semiotic concerns about the relationship between language and things, between word and world. Its literary techniques cast doubt on what we tend to call real: the world in its social-if not material-manifestation, the subject as an entity, historical facts and grand narratives as global, totalizing explanations for society and the human condition. The world is experienced and conveyed through language, and the charges against those truths range from seeing them as tainted by the medium to assuming they are entirely created by it. The world itself is radically called into question, and the status of reality and our place in it are unclear. Postmodernism creates ontological uncertainties where modernism posed mainly epistemological ones (McHale 6-11). Art has not been considered to be a reliable mirror of reality since the onset of modernism in art about a hundred years ago. By now it is not even believed to provide a source of meaning or order in the face of general chaos. The resulting literary practice involves techniques that reveal both the processes through which fiction produces meaning and the artificial status of fictional constructs. This can be achieved through implicit or explicit reflection on construction and product: metafiction. Also, traditional forms of narrative logic are broken and a radical destabilization of the fictional world and its principles results. One way of contemplating the fictional construction of meaning is conscious intertextuality. The idea of the author as original creator has long been challenged, and a number of theories regard all texts as intertextual, as they may all just be networks of quotations and incorporations of existing texts.1 Postmodern texts, however, often directly address this problem by referring, in one way or another, to specific texts or genres. The results have been called parodies by Linda Hutcheon (22), pastiches by Fredric Jameson (72), or palimpsests by Gerard Genette (532). In order to understand them, the reader needs to have internalized a set of rules and conventions of the parodied works or genres, that is, possess a specific competence (which may well be unconscious). Only then can readers understand and judge a particular performance.2 One of the genres used by postmodernist writers is the classical fairy tale, and their stories demand to be read in relation to fairy-tale traditions. Judgments about these stories use our competence, which determines our expectations of them. These expectations are indirectly or directly addressed, and we are therefore forced to question our understanding of those tales. In using formula fiction to create pastiche, palimpsest, or parody, artists expose the mechanisms that make up our competence in understanding them. Formulaic fiction-and fairy tales can be counted as an example of this-emphasizes the logic and dynamic of certain forms of plot and is rule-driven. Postmodernist writers use it parodically to show how worlds are constructed through narrative. The stylized characteristics of a genre, consciously, that is, metafictionally, applied, present stories as organized art, as games with certain rules. Briar Rose Dornroschen is one of the best-known tales from the Grimms' collection, but like most of them has predecessors in other European countries. At the beginning of the seventeenth century, the Neapolitan writer Giambattista Basile collected fifty stories in his Pentamerone, which originate from the oral tradition but were written down in baroque style. His Sun, Moon, and Talia resembles the later Dornroschen. The French writer Charles Perrault closed his 1697 collection of tales with La belle au bois dormant. But even much earlier, the basic elements of the Aarne-Thompson type 410 tale can be found in an episode of the fourteenth-century French Arthurian story Perceforest (Thompson 97). In the famous and still the most widely known version by the brothers Grimm (adapted by Disney for their animated film), the royal couple celebrates the birth of their long-wanted child. …

"To Sleep, Perchance to Dream": Sleeping Beauties and Wide-Awake Plain Janes in the Stories of Jane Yolen

"To Sleep, Perchance to Dream":Sleeping Beauties and Wide-Awake Plain Janes in the Stories of Jane Yolen Tina L. Hanlon (bio) The power of the tales is that they are . . . as evocative, as sensual, as many-faceted, as disturbing, as slippery as dreams. They offer a moral, they speak to the human condition, but it is not always the condition or the moral one immediately sees. —Yolen, Touch Magic After at least twenty-five years of intense debate, there is still much disagreement about how to interpret gender roles in fairy tales. Folklorists and fairy-tale historians have provided overwhelming evidence that the tales reflect the cultural biases of the societies in which they are retold and that they affect children and adults in complex ways. Marina Warner and Maria Tatar have revealed how easily misogynist tellers of the past exploited "the way in which a few quick strokes can reorient a story" to serve the moralist's purpose (Tatar 101). Throughout this century fairy tales have been neglected, condemned as escapist or satanic or useless, and trivialized through shallow caricatures and modernizations by new breeds of moralists and realists. In the 1970s, critics such as Marcia Lieberman and Madonna Kolbenschlag drew attention to the preponderance of passive and victimized female characters in the best-known fairy tales, warned us about their pervasive effects on the acculturation of women, and advised us to kiss these detrimental influences good-bye. Yet their hold on our psyches is so powerful that allusions to fairy tales permeate popular culture, as well as many studies in the fields of folklore, the arts, and the social sciences. While a storytelling revival has grown in recent decades, psychoanalytical critics such as Bruno Bettelheim and, more recently, Clarissa Pinkola Estes and Rollo May have emphasized the therapeutic value of folk tales and myths, which, like dreams, reflect symbolically our subconscious fears and desires. Thus, although the motif of the sleeping beauty appears to be one of the most blatantly sexist images in fairy-tale traditions—the innocent, passive victim [End Page 140] waiting for just the right prince to rescue her—a multitude of diverse voices invites us to reconsider the significance of the old tales. Present writers such as Jane Yolen continue to portray images of sleeping beauties in a variety of ways: retelling the classic tales as well as satirizing them and reviving more obscure and unfamiliar old tales, creating new tales that preserve the familiar motifs and magical atmosphere of the old "wonder tales," and writing startling new stories using a variety of experimental techniques to combine fairytale motifs with realistic contemporary and historical themes. Yolen's work is remarkable because, since the early 1960s, she has employed all these approaches in many books for children and adults that feature the adventures of strong women without severing their ties to the ancient fairy-tale realm of magic and dreams. She weaves traditional motifs into the fabric of her tales so persistently and intricately that we recognize familiar patterns even as we are startled and delighted by amazing original ones. As she has written, "There is an eclecticism to modern telling. Stories lean on stories, art on art. I can only trace my own sources so far before I realize that, in the end, it is the story that matters, not the parts: the tapestry of the tale and not the individual threads" (Tales of Wonder xi-xii). In a number of her stories, interwoven images of shadow and light, sleep and dreams, briars and roses, spinning wheels and golden threads, forests and castle towers, hair and fur, fairies and mortals create so many subtle connections that we never lose sight of the tapestry—although it is wondrously complex—while we trace the individual threads. Although Yolen's picture book The Sleeping Beauty has an unusual history in her career, its appearance in 1986 allows us to compare her retelling of the Grimm Brothers' "Briar Rose" with the sleeping beauties and wide-awake Plain Janes she created before and afterwards in her parodies of classic tales, her more original fairy tales, and her very innovative contemporary stories for older readers, including the novel Briar...

What Prison Is This? Literary Critics Cover Incest in Anne Sexton's "Briar Rose"

Previous articleNext article No AccessWhat Prison Is This? Literary Critics Cover Incest in Anne Sexton's "Briar Rose"Dawn SkorczewskiDawn Skorczewski Search for more articles by this author PDFPDF PLUS Add to favoritesDownload CitationTrack CitationsPermissionsReprints Share onFacebookTwitterLinkedInRedditEmail SectionsMoreDetailsFiguresReferencesCited by Signs Volume 21, Number 2Winter, 1996 Article DOIhttps://doi.org/10.1086/495068 Views: 18Total views on this site Citations: 4Citations are reported from Crossref Copyright 1996 The University of ChicagoPDF download Crossref reports the following articles citing this article:Charles Levin, Dawn Skorczewski Bringing It All Back Home: Reply to Celenza, Psychoanalytic Dialogues 30, no.22 (Apr 2020): 230–236.https://doi.org/10.1080/10481885.2020.1722568Charles Levin, Dawn Skorczewski The Poetics of Boundary Violation: Anne Sexton and Her Psychiatrist, Psychoanalytic Dialogues 30, no.22 (Apr 2020): 206–221.https://doi.org/10.1080/10481885.2020.1722569Cassie Premo Steele Introduction, (Jan 2000): 1–12.https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-137-12313-8_1Cassie Premo Steele “This Kind of Hope”: Anne Sexton and the Language of Survival, (Jan 2000): 59–71.https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-137-12313-8_5