Contemporary Fairy Tale Research Articles

Heroic Quests, Magical Helpers and Obstacles: An Exploration of Archetypal Patterns and Traditional Narrative in Modern Day Fairy Tales.

The book by Vladimir Propp, titled ‘Morphology of Folktale,’ discusses thirty-one narrative functions claimed to be present in every fairy tale. Propp’s seminal work on Russian folktales provides a comprehensive framework to analyze and unveil the underlying narrative structural patterns and functions which shape and connect present-day fairy tales with traditional folklore. The present research employs Propp’s Narrative Theory (1968) as lens to explore the narrative structures of ‘Frozen’ (2013) and ‘Brave’ (2012), two renowned Disney animated movies. The study focuses on the plot of both movies to investigate the narrative functions present in their original form and the ways in which they are modified and adapted. The findings conclude that majority of functions remain same as they were propagated by Propp; however, the changes observed in the functions were based on role-switch, strained and weekend family relations, and questioning traditional expectations of marriage. This article, through identifying recurring functions performed by dramatis personae, reveals the fundamental narrative components. These contribute to the developing of each plot, that is, protagonists’ quests, journeys, interactions and transformations in both films. To serve the purpose, the researcher has made use of qualitative approach. Secondly, a table of thirty-one narrative functions is constructed and filled up for both the movies which were watched 2-3 times. Similar to Propp, the analyst has adopted a syntagmatic approach to observe the degree to which these functions are still there in contemporary fairy tale movies. Lastly, this study would be beneficial for all those who want to conduct study in the fields of Fairy Tales, Structuralism and Narratology.

All the Better to Eat You with: Sexuality, Violence, and Disgust in ‘Little Red Riding Hood’ Adaptations

In this paper I explore how fears of incorporation, sexual violence, permeability and ‘leakiness’ and metaphorical and literal villains are negotiated within the contemporary fairy tale retelling tradition. Through the close reading and comparative analysis of two twenty-first century Young Adult (YA) retellings of ‘Little Red Riding Hood’ from the 2010s (Sisters Red by Jackson Pearce and Elana K. Arnold’s Red Hood), I argue that this representation and negotiation of sexual, violent, and gustatory appetites is made possible due to the intersection of the fairy tale, horror, and YA genres, creating a unique space in which the lycanthropic and human figures are sources of dread and intrigue and the terrifying and absurd. In doing so, I argue that this contemporary tradition continues the well-established narrative of the fairy tale as a site of simultaneous high dramatics and interrogation of the everyday.

Facing Your Fears: Navigating Social Anxieties and Difference in Contemporary Fairy Tales

In the 20th and 21st centuries, the rise of audio-visual media, particularly cinema and television, brought about new visual techniques and storytelling conventions that have transformed the way fairy tales are adapted for the screen. Initially adapted for a younger audience, newer adaptations often return to the darker and more horrific elements of the source texts; this includes body horror and an emphasis on physiological differences. This article employs structural, cultural, and folkloric interpretive lenses for the analysis of three contemporary, audio-visual fairy tales to discuss the way contemporary fairy tales include disability and difference as social constructs that are shaped by cultural attitudes and anxieties. The stories’ plots are driven by the protagonists’ “otherness”, and these texts feature transformations that provide clues to understanding current standards of beauty and normality. I argue that newer adaptations place an emphasis on finding resolutions to difference that challenge the traditional idea that if one has a face or body that strays from the standard of the norm, one must die, relegate oneself to the margins, or join others like oneself.

OVERLOOKED AVANT-GARDE IN THE YOUTH OPUS OF LOJZE KOVAČIČ

<p><span>The article presents the literary works foryouth by Lojze Kovačič (1928-2004) who mostly wrote for adults.He was born in Basel, Switzerland, but before the Second World War, the author's family had to leave Switzerland and they emigrated to the then Kingdom of Yugoslavia, to the birthplace of his father. As early as 1947, he began publishing in Slovene in the student newspaper “Mi mladi” (We Young). After 1950, he wrote short modern fairy tales for children with modernist elements typical of adult literature. This deliberate modernity already heralds a top author who, for example, translated Kafka for children. In his initial phase, he collaborated with illustrators (e.g., Milan Bizovičar), created comics with avant-garde art elements and wrote science fiction. The most famous is the collection of short contemporary fairy tales “Zgodbe iz mesta Rič-Rač” (Stories from the City of Rič-Rač, 1962- ) which has been reprinted several times and represents only a third of the author's oeuvre. Two-thirds are unpublished, scattered through various radio shows and magazines. The editor of Pionirski list, Marija Kovačič Vida, published texts by a whole generation of authors in the 1950s and 1960s. In the most famous anthologies, entitled “Za celo leto: priročnik iger in deklamacij” (For the Whole Year: A Handbook of Games and Declamations, 1960) and “Praznični koledar: pesmi, črtice in igre za šolske prireditve” (Holiday Calendar: Poems, Literary Sketches, and Games for School Events, 1976), she made an outstanding review of literary creativity intended for children and youth. Based on the study of the author's oeuvre for youth, we can easily conclude that the author is a pronounced modernist, as he used avant-garde approaches, elements of art deco, Bauhaus, camera obscura, puppets, mundus inversus, commercials, etc. He translated picturesque visual images into modernist texts for young people. At the end of the article, suggestions are given for a scientific-critical monograph dealing with the author's literary opus for youth which is characterized by translation of visual into verbal and vice versa (e.g., puppets, comics), as well as between other media. It is paradoxical that L. Kovačič in his literary worksintended for adults was rather critical of the socialist system in his second homeland (1945-1991), but he nevertheless published the most literary units for youth during this very period, and his work was also regularly included in the curricula (1984, 1998) and readers in schools, while in the latest curriculum from 2019 he is completely overlooked and omitted. Based on his writing, L. Kovačič is a truely European author. He died on 1 May 2004, the day Slovenia became a member of the EU and the intense oblivion of history began. L. Kovačič was one ofthe victims of this process.</span></p><p><span><strong>Keywords:</strong> Lojze Kovačič, youth opus, art deco, avant-garde, Bauhaus, topsy-turvy world, camera obscura, puppets, radio, commercials.</span></p>

Edith Nesbit's contemporary fairy tales: The influence of childhood experiences on artistic manifestation

This research conducts a comprehensive examination of the influence exerted by early life experiences on an author's literary corpus, with a particular emphasis on Edith Nesbit (1858-1924), the author of children’s novel, and her incorporation of childhood memories to enrich the contemporary fairy tale genre. Utilizing Melanie Klein’s (1882-1960) theoretical framework, a renowned Austrian-British psychoanalyst, the investigation endeavours to deliver an exhaustive analysis of Nesbit's artistic persona. Nesbit's children's narratives, as modern fairy tales, embody an internal realm of unconscious reverie akin to Klein's concept of phantasy. Central to Nesbit's tales are young protagonists who confront challenges associated with separation from caregivers, the establishment of identity, reality appraisal, body image maturation, and object relations. Edith Nesbit's harrowing childhood experiences shaped her into the imaginative author she ultimately became. By delving into the realm of fantasy and creativity, Nesbit achieved a sense of completeness and resilience, allowing her to overcome her feelings of loss and vulnerability. This research aims to shed light on the complex link between a writer's formative years and their creative expressions by examining the remnants of Nesbit's early life experiences. Furthermore, by emphasizing Edith Nesbit's ability to transform her experiences into her artistic body of work, this study also demonstrates the power of artistic expression as a means of self-exploration and healing.

Chronotope of modern fairy tale

One of the specifics of the oral fairy tale is its chronotope, which Vladimir Propp defined as onedimensional, in which space and time are indefinite, and the world of the miraculous and the real coexist in the same dimension of space and time. The indeterminacy of time and space in fairy tales has remained until today, however, in contemporary fairy tales, outlines of concrete space and time appear more and more often, so that the author's fairy tales change the chronotope in accordance with contemporary social circumstances. Chronotopes of a certain city, village, contemporary life and time appear, so it can be concluded that the change of chronotope in fairy tales is one of the specificities of contemporary fairy tales. The concretization of the chronotope of the fairy tale leads to the violation of one-dimensionality, which brings the narrative of the contemporary fairy tale much closer to a fantastic story. Examining the chronotopes in contemporary fairy tales, two ways of forming the narrative can be observed: retaining the chronotope of the oral fairy tale and the formation of a contemporary chronotope that is close to fantasy.

Трансформация библейских, мифологических и фольклорных моделей в «Трёх сказках о Змие крылатом, трёхголовом, огнедышащем» Радия Погодина

The contemporary fairy tale continues the traditions of previous fairy tales to bring good, teach and entertain, but already through the transformation of biblical, mythological and folklore models, the prism of the author’s experience and his life position. We propose a new look at the mythopoetic space of “Three fairy tales of the winged, three-headed, fire-breathing Serpent” by Radiy Pogodin (1989) through their holistic analysis, revealing their mythopoetic specificity and artistic originality. Comprehension of archetypal plot features, work mythological subtext, charac-ters system in fairy tales, their intertextual connections make it possible to reveal the deep content layers of the work under consideration. Fairy tales filled with mythological archaics easily incor-porate modern realities, so that the artistic world of R. Pogodin’s literary fairy tales is a unity of ancient archetypal models with renewing, sometimes acutely relevant motives. The system of my-thologemes and binary oppositions, mythological allegories and allusions form the author’s world model. Mythopoetic plot sketches and archetypal prototypes largely determine the semantic poly-semy and artistic complexity of R. Pogodin’s fairy tales. R. Pogodin’s work, being a descendant of a folk tale, continues and develops its genre features, forcing us to perceive a fairytale miracle as a part of our life in its everyday details and details. The central fabulous image – the Serpent, due to its many-sidedness and ambiguity, becomes the embodiment of biblical, folklore and mythological motives, forcing a person to direct his gaze into the depths of his soul. The semantic ambiguity and artistic complexity of the work allows us to assume its appeal to a readership of different ages.

A meseregény írói névadásának jellegzetességei

The study examines the personal names of contemporary fairy tale novels, the motivations, and a typology of name-giving. It is based on the preconception that the characters of fairy tale novels go through a marked process of individualization as a result of novelization, in contrast to the characters of fairy tales, due to which the genre gradually moves away from depicting archetypes and tries to endow its characters with more independent personality traits. This process of individualization is also reflected in the personal names found in fairy tale novels, which function as an external marker of the personal identity of the characters. In the first section, the study reviews the naming habits of folk tales and then draws attention to the specific name-giving motivations along which fairy tale novels give their characters names. The study notes that real personal names, fantasy names, and descriptive names found in folk tales go through transformation in fairy tale novels, and a secretive naming style, associative naming, and name-giving in line with the magical function of names, playfulness and comic effect grow in importance. Descriptive, playful, and comic personal names – resonating with the expectations of the potential recipient – play an important role among the anthroponyms of fairy tale novels, and can even affect the story with their meanings or sound.

A Methodological Framework for the Interdisciplinary Literary Text Analysis

All scientific endeavours require researchers to develop an understanding of the available methodological tools to perform the needed studies. These tools can be applied depending on the field, purpose and context of the study. This article outlines and argues for ways to construct methodological framework appropriate for an in-depth interdisciplinary analysis of a literary text. The purpose of this study is to build the interdisciplinary methodological framework for literary text analysis using approaches of two humanities sciences – pedagogy and philology (linguistics and literature). The material for the research is a contemporary fairy tale Bunny Non-Hopper and His Brave Mommy by Oksana Drachkovska, Ukrainian writer and journalist. Relevance, innovation, importance and complexity of the author’s fairy tale theme, which appears both in the field of modern pedagogy and current philological interpretations justified our choice. Among the methods applied in the paper are literary studies interpretation that outlines a place of the fairy tale in the context of similar Ukrainian and foreign literature and reveals features of the its gender constructions; linguistic analysis based on communicative-pragmatic and conceptual approaches that focus on the text-discursive level along with pedagogical approaches that enable the representation of the text’s educational potential. The suggested framework consists of two levels – general scientific and specific scientific. On the general scientific level, it deploys systematic, synergetic, and paradigmatic approaches, whereas on the specific scientific level – linguistic approaches (communicative pragmatic and conceptual), literary studies approaches (intertextual and gender), and pedagogical approaches (integrated, inclusive, humanistic, empowerment), thus employing knowledge and specifics of each science. Besides a system-building function aimed to obtain comprehensive information about the object of the study, the proposed methodological framework for the interdisciplinary literary text analysis embraces an anthropocentric paradigm centred on children with special educational needs.

Prince Charming na licencji? Totalizacja baśni

The aim of the paper is to present how the culture of convergence has influenced the fairy tale. Jack Zipes stated that since Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs the “sense of wholeness, seamless totality, and harmony” has become a basic experience of the fairy tales’ audience. The totalisation of the fairy tale is both a continuation and a transformation of the described tendency, claims the author. Creating fairy tales’ universes in comics, TV series, movies etc. and building fairy tales’ supersystems are the expressions of the phenomenon. As opposed to Disney productions, contem-porary fairy tales are patchworks, with visible stitches between heterogenic elements. Due to open composition new elements (plots, characters etc.) could be added without end, but creating connec-tions between them is challenging and nowadays one of the most interesting aspects of fairy tales.

The Fabulous Journeys of Alice and Pinocchio: Exploring Their Parallel Worlds by Laura Tosi with Peter Hunt

Reviewed by: The Fabulous Journeys of Alice and Pinocchio: Exploring Their Parallel Worlds by Laura Tosi with Peter Hunt Jan Susina (bio) The Fabulous Journeys of Alice and Pinocchio: Exploring Their Parallel Worlds. By Laura Tosi with Peter Hunt. McFarland, 2018. Books speak to other books, both consciously and unconsciously. I frequently pair the reading of texts whose themes or plots overlap: Louisa May Alcott's Little Women and Mark Twain's Tom Sawyer; Lewis Carroll's Alice's Adventures in Wonderland and L. Frank Baum's The Wonderful Wizard of Oz; and Heinrich Hoffmann's Struwwelpeter and Roald Dahl's Charlie and the Chocolate Factory. But, although I often include both Alice and Carlo Collodi's Pinocchio in a history of children's literature course, it has never occurred to me to pair these two novels. After reading Laura Tosi's study that is intended to be "a critical narrative and a parallel reading of two classics, which records mutual interests and avenues of exploration between and across diverse linguistic, historical, and national borders of England and Italy" (2), such a pairing now appears obvious to me. The most useful aspects of this study lie in Tosi's carefully examination of Pinocchio, drawing upon her own scholarship as well as that of other Italian scholars not previously translated into English. As an Italian children's literature scholar, Tosi spends about sixty percent of the book examining Pinocchio and the other forty percent focusing on Alice. While Peter Hunt's name also appears in the title, he contributes just two short sections to this volume—the first in chapter 2, detailing how Alice and Pinocchio function as gendered children's books, and the second in chapter 4, discussing the use of fairies by Carroll, Collodi, George MacDonald, and Charles Kingsley—and in the Appendix his own quirky contemporary fairy tale, "The Strange Meeting in Wonder-Tuscany," in which he imagines the meeting of these two famous protagonists. Tosi acknowledges that Alice and Pinocchio differ in many ways, including their literary sources, authorial intentions, and the widely differing political and cultural backgrounds of the authors, yet she makes compelling claims for similarities between the two distinctive texts. Both books were written by eccentric bachelors who [End Page 192] published under pen names, and both were intended for a dual audience of children and adults. Building on the work of Ann Lucas Lawson, who has previously written on the similar nature of the authors' biographies, their frequent use of talking animals, and the pivotal use of courtroom scenes, Tosi argues that the books are also similar in their structure and composition: both are episodic wanderings of a protagonist who is confronted by a series of odd and somewhat threatening creatures during their travels. Curiously, both authors constructed the stories in two distinct sections. While Carroll intended Alice's Adventures in Wonderland and its sequel Through the Looking-Glass to be separate texts, the strong interlocking and mirroring of characters and episodes between the two volumes has led many publishers and makers of film adaptations to blend them into a single text. Similarly, Collodi produced Pinocchio in two distinct stages. Pinocchio I, initially published in the children's magazine Giornale dei bambini in 1881, originally ended with what is now chapter 15, which features the protagonist's gruesome death. At the request of the magazine's readers, Pinocchio II begins with his revival and chronicles his continuing struggle to become a real boy. Both texts are strongly influenced by the fairy tale and fantasy tradition. In addition, each is lauded as a national literary icon; Alice is considered stereotypically British and Pinocchio is viewed as an embodiment of Italian culture. Both texts are highly theatrical in nature, with Alice being influenced by the British pantomime tradition and Pinocchio growing out the world of puppetry. Alice and Pinocchio experience unexpected and grotesque body changes; after eating, Alice grows either too tall or too short for her environment and experiences an elongated neck, while Pinocchio is famous for his nose that grows when he tells lies. Metamorphosis occurs in both books, with the Duchess's baby transformed into a pig in Alice's arms, and...

The metaphorical Value of Postmodern Fairy Tale: Childhood Characters and Ghosts of the Past in Spanish-Contemporary Fantastic Cinema (G. del Toro and J. A. Bayona)

This paper aims to analyse the metaphorical meaning and the underlying narrative structure of contemporary fairy tales and their thematic lines. Focusing on children’s characters, a selection of six contemporary Spanish films of the fantastic by Guillermo del Toro and Juan Antonio Bayona are analysed: firstly, El espinazo del diablo (2001, director), El laberinto del fauno (2006, director) and Mamá (2013, executive producer, directed by A. Muschietti) and secondly, the films of J.A. Bayona El orfanato (2007, director), Un monstruo viene a verme (2016, director), El secreto de Marrowbone (2017, productor ejecutivo, dirigida por Sergio G. Sánchez). These thematic lines will explore the maternal-filial bonds and the connections of monstrous children’s characters with the fantasy and the ghostly beings.

Emma Dononghue’s and James Finn Garner’s Rebellious Cinderellas: Feminism and Satire for Empowerment in Contemporary Fairy Tales

The end of the 20th century witnessed a rewriting of traditional tales for children in English. In 1997, Irish writer Emma Donoghue published Kissing the Witch: Old Tales in New Skins, a sequence of re-imagined fairy tales that was shortlisted for the James L. Tiptree Award. In 1994, American writer James Finn Garner had also re-written many well-known stories for children and had them compiled in a single volume: Politically Correct Bedtime Stories. These new versions of Cinderella incorporate formal, structural and ideological alterations that subvert the traditional fairy tale genre. Using intersectionality as a theoretical research framework, the analysis of these works demonstrates that when the matrix of social power is dissected, the existing networks of oppression are exposed. While both versions are centred around gender, Donoghue and Garner employ different strategies, namely queer alliances and parodic scenes respectively, with the aim of overcoming the same structural obstacles. The resulting characters are rebellious and successful women who challenge tradition and open new horizons for female empowerment through the reinvention of the fairy tale genre.

Transformacje wzorców baśniowych w literaturze dziecięcej obecnej na współczesnym rynku wydawniczym

Transformation of fairy tales patterns in children’s literature available on the contemporary publishing marketWhat the contemporary publishing market offers the youngest readers are texts that make various forms of fairy tale characters — a strongly representative group among them consists of texts that are transformations of fairy tale patterns that are deeply rooted in the mass imaginations including children’s imagination, which promote a new version of a well-known story: fairy tale renarrations. Such texts not only constitute evidence of changes in the fairy tale genre, but also prove the continuous updates on fairy tales. The aim of the article is to present and discuss how the authors modify specific characteristics of the fairy tale and play with its tradition. The examples of recognizable fairy tale patterns that are deeply rooted in the culture Little Red Riding Hood, Snow White, Hansel and Gretel, Sleeping Beauty, Cinderella were used to present the primary mechanisms of use and modification of fairy tales in children’s literature on the post-2000 Polish publishing market.The description of intertextual relationships between the fairy tale patterns and their renarrations renarration mechanisms has been supplemented with an analysis of influence of popular culture on children’s literature interpenetrating of cultural and literary circulations and the fashion for fairy tales. The studied works include those that have been written with gender education in mind, promotion of knowledge on rights of a child or the environment and those primary aim of which is to entertain the young audience through reading. The article is also an encouragement to reflection on the genealogy of contemporary fairy tales and the shape, in which the “children’s fabulous fairy-tale-sphere” functions, and the factors that influence it.

Text-image relationships in contemporary fairy tales

The article analyzes relations between the text and the image as two different semiotic modes in the framework of multimodal studies. Key theoretical approaches to this issue are outlined. Visual and verbal narratives are examined at three levels: ideational, interpersonal and textual. The ideational meaning system comprises actions, characters and circumstances. The interpersonal system covers a wide range of issues connected with interaction between the reader and the characters. The textual meaning is realized by giving prominence to certain objects in the image or the text. Logico-semantic relations of elaboration, enhancement and extension are revealed. Elaboration is characterized by clarification and exemplification, the image may be more general than the text, and vice versa. Enhancement relations include various circumstances (temporal, spatial, causal), besides, both the text and the image may enhance each other. Extension adds new, semantically unrelated information and offers alternative ways of story unfolding. The research is based on contemporary picture books (J. Scieszka, L. Anholt, F. French, R. Munsch) and illustrated fairy tales (E. Delessert, B. Ensor) and directed at revealing various types of text-image relations.

Fairy Tale Traditions in Amateur and Professional Young Writers’ Creativity

The turn of the 21 st century has seen Russian writers’ increased interest in the genre of fairy tale. This paper discusses young Russian writers’ approaches to fairy tale traditions in texts of their own. The subjects of the study consisted of the Debut Prize winners and the so-called amateur writers (fans of Tolkien’s and Rowling’s books, and gamers) and their literary works. The study is aimed at establishing main trends in usage of folklore traditions in the first two decades of the 21st century; the paper is also concerned with examining similarities and differences between two generations of modern Russian writers in the matter of their approaches to classical heritage. To compare fairy tale texts, Vladimir Propp’s narrative model has been applied. One of the central claims of the study is that young authors tend to emulate literary samples by prominent contemporary Russian writers (mostly by Lyudmila Petrushevskaya). Thus, an efficient way of creating a contemporary fairy tale by a young author is to immerse its characters into the modern reality that is presented in a variety of its manifestations – from everyday routine to philosophic ideas. The young writers’ texts display such traditional features of literary folklorism as genuine fairy tale plots and motifs, their structural and style models, characters, magical objects, and the artistic device of estrangement.

Genre Transformation of the Fairy Tale in Contemporary Russian Literature

This research is devoted to some peculiarities of structure and semantics of contemporary Russian fairy tale. The analyzed genre model is quite actual in the literature of modern turn of the centuries. It is actualized in the creativity of L. Petrushevskaya, A. Kabakov, B. Akunin, M. Fray, D. Bykov, etc. This is connected with the universality of themes and problems and the dynamics of structure of genre analyzed. Modern literature process suggests the use of various genre forms (including fairy-tale one) in the context of realization of game strategies of world construction with the deconstruction principle domination. The usage of the most productive for such kind of research methods (structural-semantical and comparative ones) gives grounds for understanding the specifics of realization of deconstruction principle through the variety of forms and meanings. For example, the scheme of “genre memory” is widely used in contemporary fairy tale. If that scheme deals with the sphere of semantics, then structural components are actively deconstructed (e.g. fairy tales by L. Petrushevskaya). If the meaningful fairy tale composition models are actualized, then the semantic component is widely transformed (e.g. Moscow Fairy Tales by A. Kabakov). The most important peculiarity of contemporary fairy tale is the integration of fairy tale, legendary, mythological and literary plots to the one game system. The result of this is on the one hand travestying of the iconic plots, on the other hand achieving the new meanings due to including context mechanisms.

Juggling Symbolism in Deconstructing the Contemporary Fairy Tale: The Case of “Cinderella”

Symbolism can be easily depicted in the history of fairy tales, especially ones concerned with women’s discourse. In the fairy tale cannon, symbolism has been used by patriarchy as a cultural as well as a political tool by authors of the fairy tale genre, so when viewing symbolism in fairy tales, it should be traced back to the values and norms in the cultures behind those tales. However, contemporary feminist fairy tales that portray female characters with a focus on their subjectivity, reject the portrayal of female passivity and weakness found in traditional tales. A major part of the feminist discourse looks at symbols as an agent of women’s empowerment. With the emergence of third-wave feminism, writers as well as film authors and directors have started to express women’s views through fairy tales. In the light of the modern views about the use of symbolism, I argue that contemporary fairy tales juggle symbolism as a means of resistance. In the light of the aforementioned account, the present paper examines three contemporary retellings of “Cinderella” including Tanith Lee’s short story “When the Clock Strikes” (1983), Emma Donoghue’s short story “The Tale of the Shoe” (1993), and Andy Tennant’s film Ever After: A Cinderella Story (1998). The researcher addresses three symbols, namely “The Symbol of Silk,” “The Symbol of Number Three” and “The Symbol of the Clock”. Interestingly, findings show that contemporary versions of “Cinderella” reinvent female characters, and revisit them to come up with ways to empower women as a counterattack against patriarchal versions with their oppressed women.

Introduction

Introduction Carrie Messenger There are stories we can't stop telling, and in the retelling, they become new stories and old stories at the same time. Fairy tales, with their once-upon-a-time and kingdoms that do not match our geography, are outside of our time and space. They live in the moment of the retelling. Myths explain why things are the way they are. History and geography are built into the idea of a myth. We are here now in this place, and the myth holds the past and present together for us, tying us to the time and the place before the retelling. Fairy tale and myth are two sides of the same coin, Janus-faced, the paired siblings of Artemis and Apollo, Hansel and Gretel. This Pleiades special feature has three fairy tales and two myths. The stories cover ground from Atlanta, Moldova, Appalachia—the Old World and the New. The contemporary fairy tale has a rich tradition, from the cities of Italo Calvino, the Gothic reworkings of Angela Carter, and the everyday atrocities of Lyudmila Petrushevskaya. Reworkings of myths range from James Joyce's Ulysses to Christa Wolf 's Cassandra. The stories we have here in this special feature retell Catskins, Hansel and Gretel, Golem, Sisyphus, and Baucis and Philemon. Catskins is a English fairy tale in the Cinderella family. Lucas Church's "Catskins & the Boy-King" takes the tale to contemporary Appalachia. Church has also incorporated a myth in The Frank C. Brown Collection of NC Folklore about a headless dog that would follow anyone who disturbed the place of its master's death. Compared to other Cinderalla stories, Catskins has an unusually active heroine, but in Church's tale, the boundaries between genders are blurred even further. The legend of the Golem, the clay creature brought to life with the power of a word to do his master's bidding, is taken from Jewish Prague and placed in early twentieth-century Atlanta in Maggie Nye's "We Made a Golem." It's after Leo Frank's 1913 trial for the murder of Mary Phagan. Leo Frank was Jewish; Mary Phagan was not. Mary Phagan was a child laborer in Frank's pencil factory. Leo Frank was lynched in 1915 and posthumously pardoned by the state of Georgia in 1986. The girls at the center of Nye's story might make a Golem, but their story echoes the Salem Witch trials as well. The Golem has many mistresses. My version of "Hansel and Gretel" is about the Moldovan Famine of 1947, using both Moldovan oral tales and some of the most famous Grimm tales on famine to provide a framework. I am interested in tales of famine because they are stories stripped down to their elements. What will characters do to survive? They speak to cultures in catastrophe, but also to environmental disasters and epic failures of government, providing a useful mirror to our own contemporary culture. When I first came to Moldova as a Peace Corps Volunteer, I kept noticing that people would refer to certain families as cannibals. I thought it was a joke, or some kind of slang insult I wasn't understanding, maybe some kind of reference to some kind of capitalist instinct, cannibalism as a metaphor. I'd never heard of the Moldovan Famine of 1947. "Hansel and Gretel" is a story that holds our memories of famine. "Hansel and Gretel" is a story that contains not only our fears of famine and cannibals, but our draw to dessert: that which we do not need, but that we crave for excess, the sugar that delights us. Sisyphus pushes his rock up the hill in Hades forever. In Teresa Milbrodt's "Sisyphus" this repetitive action has turned him into an old man who looks like he works out, an old man with freakish [End Page 64] strength. He's irresistible at the senior center. The story takes the classical epic move of the journey to the land of the dead. Fairy tales abound with stories of the test of whether or not it is possible to be kind to the ugly and/or annoying old woman in the woods, and...

Dva modela ženskega pravljičarstva na Slovenskem – pisateljice in pripovedovalke<br>Two Models of Women Storytelling in Slovenia – Women Writers and Women Performers of Fairy Tales</br>

In the article are presented Slovenian women fairy tale writers who were included in the streams of fairy tale writing in the middle of the 19th century, when Josipina Turnograjska published the fairy tale “Rožmanova Lenčica” (Rožman’s Lenčica) in 1853. This is much later than the start of European women fairy tale writing, which has its roots in the late medieval period with the trobairitz, and continued in the 16th century. After that the new stream of women fairy tale writers developed with the preciosite in the 17th century. The author researches development of women fairy tale writing in Slovenia and classifies their creation of fairy tales in two main models: writing literary fairy tales and storytelling or performing folktales. Lately, among Slovenian women, writing contemporary fairy tales is also popular.