Fairy Tale Genre Research Articles

THE AWARENESS OF 8TH GRADERS TOWARDS PARTİCULAR GENRES OF FAIRYTALE AND STORY

Problem Statement: The research question is; “what is the awareness of 8th graders for structural elements and features of content and style of texts which they read and write?” Purpose of the Study: In the research, it was aimed to determine the awareness level to fairytale and story genres of 8th grade students oriented to understanding and understanding what is read from these abilities based on expressing and to writing activity areas, the concern of the research is determined and proposed within this framework. Method(s): The research is mixed form. In order to determine the level of awareness of the research intended to understand what is being read, the same fairy tale and story texts are presented to the total of 238 8th grade students in 5 different groups. Two questions are presented under these texts. While in the first question the genre of the text was being asked, in the second question the reasons for choosing the given genre was asked to be detailed. Additionally, the comprehension situations of situation whether the read text is written in `fairytale` or `story` genre will be examined. In the research, the nature of awareness of 8th grade students related to genres and awareness level particular to `story` and `fairytale` genres are sampled. In the research, the content validity is provided in parallel with expert views. Findings and Results: As a result, it is noted that the realization of the read texts of the students and the written description of the properties of these genres are achieved in the desired rate. The student is not successful in the text creation process. The students` realization rate of the read text, when a text on fairytale genre is read, is %88.07. When texts intended to writing skills of the students are considered, the rate of the students that can create appropriate texts for fairytale genres typical properties is %68.69. The rate of students that can write texts appropriate to typical properties of the story, is %54.724. Conclusions and Recommendations: In textbooks of Turkish, allowing text samples with successful constructs which can help to teach genre full play and teaching students, with activities, defining features for genres of texts, it is possible to be capable of reaching the aims for teaching genre determined by the Ministry of National Education.

Erotic Infidelities: Love and Enchantment in Angela Carter’s “The Bloody Chamber” by Kimberly J. Lau

Reviewed by: Erotic Infidelities: Love and Enchantment in Angela Carter’s “The Bloody Chamber” by Kimberly J. Lau Merja Makinen EROTIC INFIDELITIES: LOVE AND ENCHANTMENT IN ANGELA CARTER’S “THE BLOODY CHAMBER,” by Kimberly J. Lau. Series in Fairy-Tale Studies. Detroit, MI: Wayne State University Press, 2015. 180 pp. $31.99 paper; $24.99 ebook. While Angela Carter’s short story collection The Bloody Chamber and Other Stories (1979) has never really been out of the critical debate regarding its fairy tale genre, Kimberly J. Lau’s complex, scholarly exploration of Carter’s preoccupation with sexuality and desire is a welcome addition to the discussion. The Bloody Chamber, as an acknowledged major literary text, repays such a lengthy focus on its content and context. As Lau argues, despite the collection’s patriarchal baggage, Carter never gives up on her exploratory and challenging renditions of heterosexual love. The utilization of the animal and the monstrous allows for alternate “marvelous sexual couplings and imaginative hybridities,” which enable Carter to escape not only phallocentric but also, more controversially, feminist expectations in a textual recuperation of heterosexual desire, love, and companionship (p. 11). (The “feminists” here refer to a narrow range of early radical readings that refuted Carter’s assertion that she was a feminist writer, albeit of a more postmodern persuasion.) Erotic Infidelities: Love and Enchantment in Angela Carter’s “The Bloody Chamber” delights in the short stories’ eclectic intertextuality and multiplicity of meaning: Although “The Bloody Chamber” seems to promise an exit (if only one could track all the references, map the connections among them, and navigate their allusive, and elusive, meanings), it quickly becomes evident that the paths Carter has set cross and cross again; her labyrinth is as complex and confusing as the social constructions of gender, sexuality, and power that similarly foil most attempts at escape. (pp. 17-18) Lau’s critique is overly fond of the term “labyrinthine” to convey an inability of interpretation. It is certainly crucial to acknowledge the complexities of cultural power and oppression that infuse these representations of desire, and it is certainly valuable to encompass Carter’s pyrotechnics [End Page 296] of allusion, but Carter’s stories still convey meanings to their plurality of readers. Luckily, each of Lau’s chapters proffers just such an “escape” in a more satisfying analysis than the quote above suggests, fueled by a scholarly tracing and elucidation of the allusions, alongside detailed close readings, to articulate the richness of the stories. Charles Perrault, Marquis de Sade, Charles Baudelaire, J. K. Huysmans, Jean Cocteau, Bram Stoker, Sheridan LeFanu, and all the usual names are present in Erotic Infidelities and appropriately dealt with, but Lau’s special focus is on unpicking Carter’s critique of Sigmund Freud’s and Jacques Lacan’s inadequacy around feminine sexuality. She argues: Carter’s implicit critique of Lacan’s theory of subjectivity in relation to the mirror stage, her exceedingly clever invocation of Irigaray’s “nothing-to-see” (itself a condemnation of the very premise upon which Freud develops his theory of sexual difference), and her differently figured “marvellous wound” all begin to destabilize the primacy of the phallus, the primacy of the Law of the Father, and to suggest an outside to the Symbolic Order. (p. 58) Lau’s conclusion is that nonhuman metamorphosis, a Derridean “continuous becoming-Other,” in the tales points to an “alternate erotic” and “autonomous subjectivity” (both feminine and masculine) (p. 72). As those who are familiar with the critical debates surrounding Carter’s The Bloody Chamber will note, there is little innovation in this analysis of the social constructedness of feminine sexuality and alternate possibilities available through fabulation and metanarrative. Even the claim that the reading of the wolf tales is radical, in her section entitled “The Phallus Reconsidered: ‘The Werewolf,’” does not quite bear fruit, although Lau does shift the Irigarayan “touch” to licking, a “symbolic” that creates “a world outside of language though still shaped by the tongue” (p. 141). However, while the claim for a fresh take on the fairy tales was unsupported, the book is enjoyable; it rehearses exactly why the tales are so rich in their textuality, incorporates the latest ecocriticism...

Thinking Through Things: Magical Objects, Power, and Agency in French Fairy Tales

Magical objects are a characteristic feature of the fairy-tale genre. In the fairy tales written by Marie-Catherine d’Aulnoy, Marie-Jeanne L’Héritier, and Henriette-Julie de Murat between 1690 and 1709, objects animated by magic empower heroines to pursue their preferred lover and reject unwanted advances. I argue that the vital, lively things imagined by d’Aulnoy, L’Héritier, and Murat function as a metaphor for the agency of seventeenth-century women. Each author uses magical objects to aid, challenge, and constrain her heroines in a different way. These differences reflect an ideological divergence about the ability of seventeenth-century women to overcome the structural limits imposed on their agency.

Ethel Carnie Holdsworth's New Fairy Tales for the Working Class

Between 1911 and 1914, Carnie Holdsworth-factory girl, workingclass poet, journalist, and budding novelist-published four books of original fairy tales.1 Three of them appeared as part of the popular Books for the Bairns series, founded by W T. Stead in 1897, to provide affordable books for workingclass children. fourth book, Lamp Girl and Other Stories, was published separately by Headley Brothers in 1914. Carnie Holdsworth's recently rediscovered writing career is notable for a number of reasons. As H. Gustav Klaus, a scholar who has written extensively on British working-class writing, notes, few British working-class women were publishing in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.2 Carnie Holdsworth is believed to be the first British working-class woman to publish a novel as well as the first to sustain a long writing career (from 1907 to the mid-1930s). As Klaus puts it, Ethel Carnie Holdsworth is by all accounts an exceptional figure (3). She herself viewed her work as part of a larger effort to provide a voice for the working class. In 1914 she explained her goal in establishing a writing group for working-class women: What I feel is that literature up till now has been lopsided, dealing with life only from the standpoint of one (Holdsworth, Rebel Pen, 31). Politically involved and ambitious to gain as wide an audience as possible for working-class writing, Carnie Holdsworth wrote in a variety of genres; in addition to her four books of fairy tales, she published three books of poetry, numerous journalistic pieces and short stories, and eleven novels. Although scholarly studies of her other work have been published, nothing has yet appeared on her fairy tales.3Camie Holdsworth was an experimenter with genre, and this experimentation is plain to see in her fairy tales. first three books contain charming short fantasies that use fairy-tale motifs popular in the late nineteenth century, such as toys that talk to one another and children who are transported to a magical world. These tales only occasionally touch on the themes found in her fourth book, Lamp Girl, whose longer, more complex stories communicate a working-class socialist vision.4 Positioned between the late Victorian flowering of fairy tales in such writers as Oscar Wilde and Mary de Morgan and decades in advance of the progressive rewriting of fairy tales in the later twentieth century, Carnie Holdsworth's later tales are working-class feminist revisions of this significant genre. Her stories often focus on princes and princesses, but they also critique her culture's class and gender biases by drawing on her personal knowledge of working-class life and by maintaining a strong Marxist-influenced political perspective. In stories such as Simon and the Magic Goat and The Two Sisters, she attacks laissez-faire capitalism and its focus on competition. final story in Lamp Girl, The Blind Prince, creates a fictional kingdom that is founded on the exploitation of the working class by its rulers. kingdom is transformed only by the prince's recognition of injustice and commitment to a community of workers. Thus, as I argue, Carnie Holdsworth's stories overturn stereotypes of working-class men and women in significant ways and effectively appropriate the fairy-tale genre for anticapitalist and communitarian ideals.Carnie Holdsworth, the daughter of factory workers and union activists, was born in Lancashire in 1886 and began half-time factory work at age 11 while she was still in elementary school. As was typical of working-class girls in Lancashire during this time period, at age 13 she began full-time work-ten hours a day-as a winder in a cotton mill. She worked in the mill for nearly a decade before her first volume of poetry, Rhymes from the Factory by a Factory Girl (1907), was published; this work attracted the attention of a sponsor, the socialist Robert Blatchford, who hired Carnie Holdsworth to write for his periodical Woman Worker. …

Fairy Tale and Trauma in Toni Morrison’sHome

Toni Morrison’s tenth novel Home (2013), set in the 1950s, presents a disturbing and dark narrative of childhood abuse, war trauma, and racial discrimination. While poignantly dramatizing the traumatic experiences of war veteran Frank Money and his sister Ycidra (Cee), the novel also explores avenues leading to resilience, resolution, and recovery. A major question that Home addressesis how traumatized characters may come “home” to a sense of belonging, to self-esteem, and to a renewed love of life. Woven into the novel’s narrative fabric are direct and indirect references to the tale of Hansel and Gretel that draw into play the expectations specific to the genre of fairy tales and folktales, in particular, and, remarkably, the expectations of a positive and reassuring ending. This essay explores the interplay between trauma and fairy-tale motifs in Home, which informs its central themes of gender, race, family, and community. Morrison envisages ways toward the resolution of trauma that contribute to developments in literary trauma theory. The fairy-tale intertext accentuates the upward movement of the novel, which presents in its final pages a new and stronger sense of a positive closure to trauma than has so far been the case in Morrison’s fiction.

GENRE AND LINGUOSTYLISTIC PECULIARITIES OF GERMAN AND UKRAINIAN FAIRY TALE

This article elucidates the concept of the folk fairy tale. Genre peculiarities and linguostylistic phenomena of German and Ukrainian folk fairy tales have been analyzed. It has been found that such artistic devices as antithesis, hyperbole, comparison are widely used in the folk fairy tale genre. Keywords: fairy tale, initial, medial and final fabulous formula, epithet, antithesis, hyperbole, comparison, metaphor, retardation.

An Untamed State by Roxane Gay (review)

Reviewed by: An Untamed State by Roxane Gay Régine Michelle Jean-Charles An Untamed State. By Roxane Gay. New York: Black Cat, 2014. ISBN 0802122515. 368 pp. $16. Roxane Gay’s first novel, An Untamed State, contains many of the typical themes found in contemporary literature by Haitian Americans living in the diaspora. She explores the myth of return, the fraught relationship between generations navigating the cultural shifts from homeland to hostland, cross-cultural marriage, and the gaping chasm between the rich and the poor in Haiti. The novel’s first sentence frames it within the fairytale genre, suggesting an attention to form that will be maintained throughout: “Once upon a time in a far-off land … I was kidnapped by a gang of fearless yet terrified young men with so much impossible hope beating inside their bodies it burned their very skin and strengthened their will right through their bones” (1). The fairy tale that is simultaneously elaborated and deconstructed is about Mireille Duval Jameson, whose supposedly perfect life is irrevocably altered after she is kidnapped by gunmen. Held for thirteen days, she is beaten, tortured, and repeatedly raped. Despite the many other themes present throughout, the novel functions primarily as a rape narrative that describes Mireille’s captivity and her stumbling attempts to put her life back together in the aftermath. In my work on representations of sexual violence, I have argued for analyzing the rape victim/survivor narrative as a genre unto itself that privileges the perspective of the survivor and refuses to use rape as a symbol for something else.1 These narratives often do little to render the violence of rape manageable for the reader. They devote careful attention to the intricacies of rape trauma syndrome—what the survivor experiences before, during, and after the rape. Ultimately these narratives refuse to simplify the healing process (which is never straightforward and almost always incomplete) for the victim/survivor of rape. An Untamed State deploys many of these strategies. As an example of the brutal force of rape that is unrelenting, Gay’s novel exemplifies the expository act of writing sexual violence. Most notably, the first two hundred pages present the details of the kidnapping. The violence is described in unremitting detail that makes the reader want to turn away while also causing us to be drawn more deeply into the atmosphere of the novel. The kidnapping that sets the plot into motion occurs on an idyllic day in Port-au-Prince just as Mireille, her American husband Michael, and their infant son exit the high gates of the lavish Duval family home en route to the beach. Mireille is snatched from the car and brought to an [End Page 203] obscure location where she is held for thirteen days. This length of time is due to the fact that her father refuses to pay the $1,000,000 ransom, fearful that the kidnappers will come back for more after he pays. The first part of the novel seems to mirror the days of captivity, gang rape, physical violence, and torture that Mireille is forced to endure; the scenes of violence describing Mireille’s ordeal are graphically relayed. Mireille is raped, gang-raped, burned, and beaten. She attempts to escape and is dragged back. An Untamed State is about the actual kidnapping itself, but even more about its aftermath: Mireille’s physical, psychological, and emotional brokenness (which she refers to as her death), the irreparable damage done to her relationship with her parents, her inability to return to the life she had before, and the calamitous results in her marriage. She suffers from telltale signs of rape trauma syndrome in the form of triggers, intense feelings of shame, disassociation, and sexual “acting out.” We are taken through the different phases of her emotional, physical, and mental states. At first Mireille fights for her life, repeating her father’s mantra to herself: “There is nothing I cannot get through if I try hard enough” (34). She threatens her captors: “My husband is going to kill you. He is going to tear you apart with his bare hands” (39–40). She fights. “I fought him and he laughed...

Seeds of Subversion in Mary de Morgan's “The Seeds of Love”

Fairy tale offers a case where the ver)? contempt for opened an opportunity for them exercise their wit and communicate their ideas . . where they might set their own seedlings and plant out their flowersMarina Warner, From the Beast the Blonde, xxiiiFor decades, feminist scholars have investigated the ways in which have revised and rewritten classic fairy tales. In particular, feminist fairy-tale research has focused on twentieth-century writers such as Angela Carter and Anne Sexton.1 But as Jack Zipes explains in his introduction Don't Bet on the Prince, There were feminist precedents set in the literary fairy-tale tradition by the end of the nineteenth century (13). He cites Mar)? de Mary Louisa Molesworth, and Evelyn Sharp as less widely known Victorian authors who conceived tales with strong heroines who rebel against convention-ridden societies (13). Yet feminist scholars have only begun appreciate the Victorian precursors the feminist fairy tale.In his essay Feminist Fairy-Tale Scholarship, Donald Haase cites the recover)? of neglected fairy-tale texts by women as a crucial area of future research (29). work of Mary de Morgan would certainly qualify as neglected. Writing at the end of the nineteenth century, de Morgan published three collections of fairy tales. However, with the exception of five critical essays and one newly released book,2 Mary de Morgan is only fleetingly mentioned by scholars in Victorian fairy-tale anthologies. In such anthologies she is given anywhere from a sentence a page, and almost all references focus on her tale A Toy Princess (1877). Furthermore, even when scholars discuss the feminist aspects of her work, they limit their discussion her strong female characters rather than explore how her plots and the minute details she provides contribute a feminist reading.Zipes acknowledged de Morgan's use of strong female characters in his introduction Victorian Fairy Tales in 1987.3 However, since then only Alicia Carroll's 2010 article, The Greening of Mary De Morgan, and Marilyn Pemberton's 2011 article, The Fairylands of Mary De Morgan, and 2012 book, Out of the Shadows, have in any way addressed de Morgan's proto-feminist treatment of gender, love, and marriage.4 Carroll analyzes The Seeds of Love through an ecofeminist lens and concentrates mainly on de Morgan's depiction of greenery and nature in relation gender and race, whereas Pemberton's analysis in both the article and book focuses mainly on de Morgan's tale The Hair Tree as evidence of her New Woman critique of marriage. My analysis takes a different approach, demonstrating how de Morgan subverts the fairytale genre further explore the problematics of ideal femininity, love, and the happily ever after in her tale The Seeds of Love.This subversive use of the fairy-tale genre is unsurprising, given Mary de Morgan's life. Born in 1850, Mary Augusta de Morgan was the youngest child of Augustus de Morgan and sister the artist and novelist William de Morgan. De Morgan's mother, Sophia Elizabeth, was most likely a great influence on her feminist leanings. In 1866 Sophia de Morgan was one of 1,499 sign the women's suffrage petition, and she was also the author of the 1870 essay Our Better Selves, which argued for better education and increased political and professional rights for (Crawford 717, 756). In 1890, Mary de Morgan followed in her mother's footsteps when she joined the Women's Franchise League, whose stated objectives were to extend women, whether married, unmarried, or widowed the right vote at parliamentary, municipal and local and other elections on the same conditions which qualify [and] establish for all equal civil and political rights with men (qtd. in Crawford 716). Mary de Morgan never married, although it is unknown whether this was due personal choice or circumstance. However, she shared her fairy tales with her family and the children of family friends, and it is in her fairy tales that readers can discern her feminist leanings. …

Disney classics and ‘Poisonous Pedagogy’: The fairytale roots of Frozen (2013)

Abstract Despite a very tenuous connection to Hans Christian Andersen’s The Snow Queen (1844), the creators of Disney’s Frozen (2013) seemed motivated to keep an affiliation with ‘traditional’ fairytales alive. Having said that, directors Chris Buck and Jennifer Lee also professed to ‘kind of taking a new approach’, while simultaneously wanting to ‘relaunch’ the spirit of the Disney ‘classics’. Although Frozen does avoid a heteronormative love story, I argue that it does indeed harken back to the fairytale-based Disney ‘classics’. This is not because the story actually recalls Andersen’s Snow Queen (1844), but because it operates on a fairytale model used by Disney’s other source for ‘classics’, the Grimm Brothers. In her recent monograph, Willful Subjects (2014), Sara Ahmed begins by quoting the Grimm Brothers’ story of ‘The Willful Child’. The wilful child is one who refuses to capitulate to authority and so is punished by God. This narrative model is part of what Ahmed, following Alice Miller, calls ‘poisonous pedagogy’, a genre of fairytale used to ‘straighten children out’ and ‘cure’ them of wilfulness. I suggest that in trying to retain some connection with the Disney ‘classics’, the creators of Frozen produced a story that leans heavily towards this tradition. Elsa, a child whose will is powerful and visible, is taught that it must be suppressed. When she wilfully abandons her duty, and flouts patriarchal authority, punishment ensues and it is only when she returns to the confines of normal society that life can go on happily. Ahmed’s arguments that this model has been formative in training western subjects to reject wilfulness are affirmed both by the film’s conclusion, and by fan reactions to Elsa’s ‘abandonment’ of Anna and Arendelle. Nevertheless, similar to the ways Ahmed develops a queer reading of ‘The Willful Child’, I suggest that a queer reading of Frozen (2013) may prove fruitful in disrupting the film’s function as ‘poisonous pedagogy’.

Failed Mothers, Monster Sons. Reading Shakespeare’S Richard Iii as a Fairy Tale

Abstract The paper looks at Shakespeare’s historical play Richard III and its fairy tale-like character given by the configuration of the main character as an arch-villain and the presence of motifs and patterns typically associated with the fairy tale genre. More specifically, it considers the mother-son relationship between the Duchess of York and Richard in the light of the motif of monstrous birth. It is not a coincidence that the emergence of such motifs coincides with the historical contexts of the early modern period. Reading Richard III in this key is related to the revisionist approach to chronicle plays.

Manipulación del género gramatical y sexual en la traducción española de un cuento de Oscar Wilde

Translation as a cultural process can be used in various ways to suppress or promote ideologies. Within the framework of Critical Studies in Translation, this article examines the presence of the phenomenon of manipulation; that is, deliberate alteration of central topics and messages for ideological purposes, in the Spanish translation of the story The Happy Prince by Oscar Wilde. It proposes that Wilde’s specific intent in using the fairy tale genre to battle heterosexism (the belief that heterosexuality is the only norm) is not transmitted in any of the Spanish versions of the story, since its English publication in 1888 to the twenty-first century.<p> The analysis proves that all twelve translations of the story found, included the famous translation by Jorge Luis Borges in 1910, manipulate the sex and sexuality of the characters by taking advantage of the commonly perceived ambiguities between the grammatical and cultural gender in Spanish. This is done in such a way that one of the messages of the story, the redemption of homosexual love and its acceptance by God, is omitted entirely to become, and promote, the standard and conventional view of sexuality that dominates contemporary Western tradition. The article finishes by pointing out the linguistic choices that need to be considered for a new translation of the story and provides the translation of a passage as an example.<p>

Roald Dahl ed. by Ann Alston and Catherine Butler (review)

Reviewed by: Roald Dahl ed. by Ann Alston and Catherine Butler Joli Barham McClelland (bio) Roald Dahl. Edited by Ann Alston and Catherine Butler. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012. In her introduction to Roald Dahl, Catherine Butler observes that while Dahl’s life has been well scrutinized in academic prose, “probably the most striking thing about academic criticism of his work is that there is so little of it” (2). It is this lack of criticism—of theoretical, thematic, linguistic, and other scholarly exploration—that the writers in this edited collection seek to rectify. The notable and impressively credentialed contributors to Roald Dahl pursue new viewpoints into his stories, discovering along the way not only a strong desire to appeal to children on their own terms, but also a dedication to many traditional family values coupled with a willingness to constantly reinvent the writer himself within Dahl’s fiction. The first half of Roald Dahl offers a delicious array of criticism on his written works, beginning with Deborah Cogan Thacker’s playing with the notion of “fairy tales” and “anti-fairy tales” in Dahl’s writings. Thacker examines both Dahl’s reliance on traditional fairy tale themes and his eschewing of the more didactic nature of civilized fairy tales in favor of a return to the “carnivalesque tendencies” of folktales. Highlighting Dahl’s use of narrative techniques and his emphasis on storytelling interaction between child and adult—or between reader and writer—within his tales, Thacker illustrates Dahl’s insistence on the power of storytelling and the ability of the teller to change both lives and fortunes. The humor often found in Dahl’s “carnivalesque tendencies,” as emphasized by Thacker, is more fully explored by Jackie E. Stallcup in her essay “Discomfort and Delight: The Role of Humour in Roald Dahl’s Works for Children.” The notion that disgust and delight are located along the same spectrum, along with Stallcup’s discussion of Dahl’s humor as stemming from artfully placed examples of incongruity, the taboo, and derision, make for enjoyable insights into Dahl’s ability to walk the very fine line between the amusing and the outlandish in his works. Dahl’s use of language throughout his stories has also been cited as both amusing and outlandish, and it is this aspect of the writer which David Rudd tackles. Arguing that Dahl employs language to disorder the status quo, most notably through scatological and violent terms, Rudd examines the writer’s lexical, phonological, typographical, semantic, and narrative inventions as direct attempts to undermine accepted power hierarchies (adult versus child, human versus animal, etc.) and uncover new methods of empowerment and ways of viewing normality. Formal education, or Dahl’s hatred of it, is an often explored topic in his oeuvre. Pat Pinsent, investigating Dahl’s “problem of school,” deftly [End Page 368] teases out the “love–hate” relationship with education as expressed in his stories, rather than identifying one of simple abhorrence. Like Pin-sent, Ann Alston finds that Dahl’s feelings toward the traditional family structure, as with his feelings toward education, are ambiguous at best. As Alston argues, Dahl rejects parental figures who fail to embrace the individuality of children and their ability to help the adults grow and learn in return. Like teachers, mother figures who fail to express love, devotion, and self-sacrifice for their children uniformly meet untimely—if highly amusing—ends in Dahl’s works. Building on Alston’s investigation of family romance, and mother figures in particular, Beverley Pennell turns a critical eye to the feminist themes in Dahl’s children’s tales. In the same vein as numerous other critics within Roald Dahl, Pennell cites the fairy tale genre, and the misogynous traditions typically found within it, to flood Dahl’s seemingly antifeminist portrayal of women with a different light. Arguing that Dahl’s female protagonists increasingly support the feminist agenda through their agency and intelligence, Pennell crafts an intricate and convincing narrative in favor of female power in his works. The second half of Roald Dahl moves outside the texts themselves to embrace popular and cultural questions surrounding his overall work as an author and his impact on the realm...

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...

‘ Everyone in the Room has a Connection to the Story’: Fairytale adaptations in devised theatre

Adapting well-known source texts for live performance lies at the heart of much devised theatre practice and fairytales have proved a rich source of inspiration in this field. This article argues that the fairytale genre, with its myriad of shared cultural symbols and vivid personal resonances lends itself particularly well to devised performance intended to be popular, accessible and celebratory, whilst also facilitating exploration of thought provoking social themes and cultural memories. Drawing on Jauss’ theories of reception and on studies of literary fairytales, this article examines Kneehigh Theatre’s version of ‘Little Red Riding Hood’ and Cartoon de Salvo’s production of ‘The Ratcatcher of Hamelin’ to show how the subject matter that these companies have frequently chosen to adapt draws the audience into the event through the sense of a shared ‘horizon of experience’. In these devised adaptations both companies actively enhance the shared cultural memories surrounding their material; their oetics of performance and the intertextual richness of fairytales allows them to affect the aesthetics of reception and to encourage an experience of theatre as social collaboration between performers and spectators. Analysis of these productions also reveals how these companies use adaptations of popular stories to question aspects of contemporary society – specifically issues surrounding the tensions between individuality and social cohesion and the communal good versus capitalist gains – by bringing the audience’s expectations of the story into play for comparison. This article suggests that adapting well-known stories has been paramount to Kneehigh Theatre and Cartoon De Salvo’s development of their performance style and has contributed to each company’s success in forming a strong sense of connection with their audiences.

Alenka Sottler: Slovenia ★ Illustrator

Alenka SottlerSlovenia ★ Illustrator Samantha Christensen Born in Ljubljana, Slovenia in 1958, Alenka Sottler was raised in a family who were well-versed in the arts. Her mother worked for a leading newspaper and printing company and her father was a sculptor. It was in her father’s studio that Alenka first learned to draw and sculpt, cultivating a love of art that would take her through both undergraduate and postgraduate studies in painting at the Academy of Fine Arts in Ljubljana. Sottler began to work as a freelance painter and illustrator for top Slovene and foreign publishers and magazines in 1988, including the largest Slovene publisher, Mladinska knija. Since then, in addition to children’s magazines, she has illustrated more than 45 books, contributing especially to the genre of fairytales. She has received several accolades for her work, especially for her illustrations in Folk Tales from Around the World. Sottler’s other awards include the Hinko Smrekar Award at the Biennial of Slovenian Illustration, as well as awards from other countries such as Japan, Croatia, and Italy, as well as 5 certificates of Merit from the Annual Exhibition in New York, and the IBBY Honor list in 2008. Trained by professors who had received their own art education in pre-war Europe, Sottler displays an awareness of the importance of the artist’s freedom of expression, and constantly experiments with her craft. Her work is reminiscent of the Late Gothic and Early Renaissance, but is executed in a contemporary style with elements of the modernist painting tradition. Her work often contains repetitive elements that form an additional narrative strand. Alenka Sottler has faced the challenges of illustrating books of great fame and familiarity such as the Grimm’s fairy stories, and the fairy tales of Oscar Wilde by bringing to them her own perspective through intense dedication and immaculate work. She has also brought new life to work from the rich tradition of Slovenian literature, in works such as Oton Župančič and Grigor Vitez, proving that illustrations are just as relevant and important as ever before. Selected Publications Agnes Cecilija [Agnes Cecilia]. Text Maria Gripe. Ljubljana: Mladinska knjiga, 1998. Print. Google Scholar Pravljice [Fairy Tales]. Text Oscar Wilde. Ljubljana: Mladinska knjiga, 1999. Print. Google Scholar Svetovne Pravljice [Folk Tales from Around the World]. Ljubljana: Nova revija, 2004. Print. Google Scholar Pepelka [Cinderella]. Text Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm. Ljubljana: Mladinska knjiga, 2006. Print. Google Scholar Svetlanine pravljice [Svetlana‘s Fairytales]. Text Svetlana Makarovič. Dob pri Domžalah: Miš, 2008. Print. [End Page 49] Google Scholar Copyright © 2012 Bookbird, Inc

The Developmental Phases of Phases Turkish Tale

Abstract Some of the fairy tales narrate the hero from birth to adulthood in a fantastic manner. They talk about the phases of life in an informal way both to the adult and to the child. In this study, the transition of the tale's hero to puberty is examined in the fairy tale “Delibalta” with the support of psychosogical development theory of Erikson and Propp's examination of fairy tale character functions. As a result, it wat found out that Delibalta shows basic biological, psychological, social and cultural realities of humanbeings coded within the speech of symbols which demonstrate a charecteristic of fairy tale genre.

Le merveilleux dans l'?uvre dramatique de Kleist

Elements of the marvellous are a striking – and recurrent – feature in Kleist’s plays and prose fiction. The marvellous is so central to Das Kathchen von Heilbronn that it not only determines the dramatic action, but has also prompted some scholars to see this work as a fairy tale drama. This essay focuses primarily on Das Kathchen von Heilbronn, a play in which a number of key issues in Kleist-scholarship are clearly foregrounded. First, the essay explores those elements – classical, christian, heathen and popular – that the marvellous draws on, and seeks to link those same elements to the specific requirements of the fairy tale genre. The essay then turns to consider the role of the marvellous itself within the play : how it exposes the deceptive character of the world of appearance (‘Schein’), how it provokes crises of identity, how it exposes contradictions within the prevailing social norms, how it mobilises a critique of an exclusively rational view of the world, and – last but not least – how it inspires poetic creativity and the quest for truth. The final part of the essay considers how the use of the marvellous enables Kleist to address not only problems of cognition and human perception, but also the role of the unconscious in guiding human behaviour. In Das Kathchen von Heilbronn (as indeed in many of Kleist’s other plays) the marvellous serves both as a means of articulating truth and, at the same time, of calling it into question. As such it highlights the distinctive character of Kleist’s work as a whole and the difficulty of situating it within literary history.

Merci esotiche che viaggiano verso occidente: la cornice e la figura del narratore popolare a partire da una lettura del Cunto de li cunti di Basile

One of the most precious goods we have gained from the East is the literary frame. Certain of its functions are observable from its early history, in the Middle Ages. In Eastern countries, ”the frame” was a communicative tool to express judgement and opinions in public according to different social conditions. In Western countries, it is still used as an to express judgement, but only in the literary world. Eric Auerbach in Zur Technik der Fruhrenaissancenovelle in Italien und Frankreich says that from Dante to Boccaccio, the literary frame becomes the story's atmosphere and its barycentre because it offers writers the possibility to organize the relationship between text and context. In my hypothesis, Auerbach's words can work to introduce a narratological function to the literary frame. We notice other two functions: an anthropological one explained by Tzvetan Todorov in La conquete de l'Amerique and a psychological one showed by Andre Jolles in De Decameron van Boccaccio. According to Tzvetan Todorov, in the seventeenth century, missionaries used literary frames to communicate with native Americans: in Historia general de las cosas de la Nueva Espana by Bernardino de Sahagun, a literary frame is used to organize different cultural knowledges. Andre Jolles metaphorically says that thanks to literary frames, we are still able to listen to the voices of popular narrators because the literary frame reproduces cognitive structures typical of children. I propose to show these functions in the Cunto de li cunti by Basile. In this way, we can observe the modernity of Basile. The Neapolitan author not only founded the fairytale genre in Europe. He also contributed to spread a universal communicative form we can observe from three points of view: narratological, anthropological, and psychological.

The Invention of Fairy Tales

AbstractRuth B. Bottigheimer has contended that a specific literary man invented the fairy-tale genre less than five centuries ago. This article is a critical examination of her claim. It interrogates the axioms underlying Bottigheimer’s proposition, probes the logical consistency of her account, and surveys Bottigheimer’s use of empirical evidence. It concludes that while Bottigheimer’s proposition is a healthy challenge to folklorists who would disregard literary texts as a matter of principle, her assumptions, reasoning, and conclusions leave much to be desired.

The Invention of Fairy Tales

Ruth B. Bottigheimer has contended that a specific literary man invented the fairy-tale genre less than five centuries ago. This article is a critical examination of her claim. It interrogates the axioms underlying Bottigheimer’s proposition, probes the logical consistency of her account, and surveys Bottigheimer’s use of empirical evidence. It concludes that while Bottigheimer’s proposition is a healthy challenge to folklorists who would disregard literary texts as a matter of principle, her assumptions, reasoning, and conclusions leave much to be desired.