Modern Fairy Tale Research Articles

Seven Wild Sisters: A Modern Fairy Tale by Charles de Lint (review)

Seven Wild Sisters: A Modern Fairy Tale by Charles de Lint (review)

Edith Nesbit’s Five Children and It: The Structure of Fantastic Space and the Concept of Childhood in Her Modern Fairy Tale

Edith Nesbit’s Five Children and It: The Structure of Fantastic Space and the Concept of Childhood in Her Modern Fairy Tale

Suspended Animation: Children's Picture Books and the Fairy Tale of Modernity by Nathalie op de Beeck (review)

Suspended Animation: Children's Picture Books and the Fairy Tale of Modernity by Nathalie op de Beeck (review)

Neil Jordan’s Ondine (2009): Irishness between Myth And Brand

Ondine (written and directed by Neil Jordan) is a modern fairy tale set and shot in Ireland on a low budget. Although the film is set in the present and makes reference to current issues, it is strongly influenced by cliched and revivalist discourses, such as were nurtured by Irish romantic and cultural nationalism. Consequently, the film frequently lapses into stereotypically romanticised representations of Irishness and obsolete gender constructs, reminiscent of those popularised by Irish-American film productions of the first half of the twentieth century. These filmic versions of Ireland are part of an ongoing and global process, the commodification of all things Irish. From this vantage point, Ondine can be seen as one more label in the branding of an always already marketed Irish identity and culture.

Discerning Characters: The Culture of Appearance in Early America Reading the “Century Illustrated” Monthly Magazine: American Literature and Culture, 1870–1893 Suspended Animation: Children’s Picture Books and the Fairy Tale of Modernity

Discerning Characters: The Culture of Appearance in Early America Reading the “Century Illustrated” Monthly Magazine: American Literature and Culture, 1870–1893 Suspended Animation: Children’s Picture Books and the Fairy Tale of Modernity

Whatever After: Fairest of All by S. Mlynowski

Mlynowski, Sarah. Whatever After: Fairest of All. New York: Scholastic Press, 2012. Print Ten-year-old Abby has just moved to Smithville with her parents and younger brother Jonah, and life just isn’t the same. One night, the two siblings knock on the creepy mirror in the basement and are instantly sucked into a fairytale land. They need to get home, but don’t know how to get there. They find themselves at the cottage where Snow White is living with the Seven Dwarfs, just as the evil stepmother in disguise is offering up a red apple to eat. They intervene and save Snow White from being poisoned! Initially they are pleased about this, but soon realize that they have interfered with Snow’s future and she won’t meet her Prince Charming. They decide to stay with Snow until they can set things right and ensure she lives happily ever after, enjoying many adventures along the way. This is the first story in a new series of modern fairy tale retellings (the second book will recount what happens to Cinderella when Abby shows up!). It’s an amusing and easy read with lots of action. Abby and Jonah have a pretty typical relationship, with a bossy older sister ordering around her rambunctious younger brother, and so they behave as you would expect. Abby is practical, but funny, and will always accomplish what she sets out to do. She therefore presents a strong female character with whom young girls can connect. The tale ends in such a way that the reader can be sure of more humorous exploits to come.Highly Recommended: 4 out of 4 starsReviewer: Trish ChatterleyTrish is a Public Services Librarian for the John W. Scott Health Sciences Library at the University of Alberta. In her free time she enjoys dancing, gardening, and reading books of all types.

Offline: Rebelling against the dictatorship of reason

What is the point of all this? Science, journals, peer review, and the vast network of meetings and conferences that promote the exchange of new research? Most scientists would argue that this industry of knowledge surely has something to do with the idea that reporting original data, commissioning work that aims to shape policy, and writing news and opinion have some intrinsic social value. But John Gray, in his compelling and disturbing new book, The Silence of Animals, disagrees. He recognises that many people believe science opens up a “vista of improvement” for our planet. He agrees that our future has become “identified with the increase of knowledge and power.” Yet the “myth of salvation through science” is a “modern fairy tale”. “Knowledge cannot save us from ourselves”, Gray writes. We might indeed grow our knowledge about the world, but we prove time and again that we are unable to learn from our experiences, which he catalogues with relish: disease, genocide, slavery, murder, barbarism, corruption, cannibalism, incarceration, financial crises, inequality, xenophobia, and even the collapse of civilisations. Our lives are full of “absurdities, tragedies, and crimes”. There is no such thing as “the light of reason”. Human beings are “incurably irrational”. Even the idea of humanity itself is an “illusion”. Humans have no special claim to superiority. We do not bring order to the world. We have never succeeded in creating a “haven of peace”.

The Universe of Oz: Essays on Baum's Series and Its Progeny (review)

Reviewed by: The Universe of Oz: Essays on Baum's Series and Its Progeny Walter Squire (bio) The Universe of Oz: Essays on Baum's Series and Its Progeny. Edited by Kevin K. Durand and Mary K. Leigh. Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 2010. In "Ask the Clock of the Time Dragon," Randall Auxier's contribution to The Universe of Oz, the author asks, "Why does the Marvelous Land of Oz keep re-inventing itself in our culture?" (121). Auxier's answer, "we love to remember Oz, we love to re-experience it, and we love to anticipate it" (134), seems to depend upon an already existing multiplicity of Ozian texts, a multiplicity well represented in the seventeen essays comprised by The Universe of Oz. Versions of Oz covered in those essays include L. Frank Baum's 1900 The Wonderful Wizard of Oz as well as his sequels to this novel; the 1939 MGM musical The Wizard of Oz; the 1975 stage musical The Wiz and its subsequent 1978 Motown film adaptation; Tina Landau's 1994 play 1969; Shelley Jackson's 1995 hypertext Patchwork Girl; Gregory Maguire's The Wicked Years trilogy (now a tetralogy); Wicked, the 2003 stage musical based upon the first of Maguire's Oz novels; and Tin Man, a 2007 miniseries broadcast on the Syfy channel. The range of Ozian texts covered in The Universe of Oz is matched by the diversity of critical approaches taken by contributors. For instance, Ronald [End Page 513] Zank examines Landau's 1969 and Emily A. Mattingly looks at Jackson's Patchwork Girl through the lens of queer theory, whereas Paula Kent considers the novel The Wonderful Wizard of Oz and Jené Gutierrez deems the movie The Wizard of Oz examples of Joseph Campbell's monomyth. Most complexly, Randall Auxier reveals the parallels between Gregory Maguire's treatment of time in The Wicked Years and the theories of Friedrich Nietzsche, Alfred North Whitehead, and Henri Bergson. Another significant contribution is Kevin Tanner's "The Wonderful Wizard of Oz: Religious Populism and Spiritual Capital"; after providing a quick summary of Oz history, Tanner covers arguments regarding the degree to which The Wonderful Wizard of Oz is a populist allegory. Noting that current critical consensus rejects any link between this book and late nineteenth-century populism, Tanner shifts to a spiritual reading of the novel, stressing Baum's Methodist upbringing and his later participation in theosophy during the 1890s, the decade previous to The Wonderful Wizard's publication. Considering that several contributions to The Universe of Oz attempt to connect Oz to a philosophy or another text, the book resembles The Wizard of Oz and Philosophy, a 2008 volume edited by Randall E. Auxier and Phillip S. Seng, the latter work composed of essays connecting Ozian texts to philosophers ranging from Socrates to David Lewis. In his preface to The Universe of Oz, editor Kevin K. Durand indicates that a possible pitfall of such an approach of linking texts with other texts or with philosophies is that "one uses [The Wizard of] Oz or any other popular culture artifact as a vehicle for illustrating a text other than itself" (6). The best essays in The Universe of Oz avoid this pitfall by not merely using Oz as a starting point to discuss something else, instead revealing how particular Ozian texts themselves embody principles and tendencies applicable to other texts and to genres overall. This approach is best exemplified by "Dorothy and Cinderella: The Case of the Missing Prince and the Despair of the Fairy Tale." Coauthors Agnes B. Curry and Josef Velazquez move from noting how the 1939 film The Wizard of Oz deviates from Vladimir Propp's morphology of folktales to establishing a generalized taxonomy of modern fairy tales, revealing that the latter frequently include a nonmagical heroine within a magical world. A second trend Curry and Velazquez extrapolate from The Wizard of Oz is that "the Prince will not be available to" (40) the nonmagical heroine, thus indicating a shift away from marriage in modern fairy tales with female protagonists. While this shift might seem connected to increasing gender equality over the past century, whereby females have become less defined by their...

Suspended Animation: Children's Picture Books and the Fairy Tale of Modernity (review)

Suspended Animation: Children's Picture Books and the Fairy Tale of Modernity (review)

Animated. Scripted. Not Innocent.

Animated. Scripted. Not Innocent. Philip Nel (bio) Suspended Animation: Children’s Picture Books and the Fairy Tale of Modernity, by Nathalie op de Beeck. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 2010. Racial Innocence: Performing American Childhood from Slavery to Civil Rights, by Robin Bernstein. New York: New York UP, 2011. Today, some of the best work on children’s literature is being done in the field of American studies. Nathalie op de Beeck’s Suspended Animation and Robin Bernstein’s Racial Innocence both offer new, and deeply historical, ways of understanding how what children read may affect the ways they think. Op de Beeck’s institutional home is an English department, and Bernstein’s is an African American studies department, but in their new books both exemplify the interdisciplinary rigor that defines the strongest scholarship in American studies. In Suspended Animation, op de Beeck develops a cultural history of the American picturebook from the 1910s to the 1940s, maintaining a deft balance between formalist close readings, socioliterary context, and theoretically motivated analyses. Her thorough mapping of the term “picturebook” should be required reading for all students of children’s literature. In the introduction and part of the first chapter, she develops a definition that is both expansive and precise. The picturebook is not a “genre” but “a mode of production, dependent on shifting beliefs about childhood, cultural tastes, and standards of judgment” (11). Some of those standards include formal criteria, such as the “complex interdependency of visuals, words, and sequence,” and how the picturebook differs from illustrated texts (which “include images but do not rely on them”) or comics (which favor panel-to-panel closure over page-to-page closure) (xii–xiv). But they also include her sense of the picturebook as hybrid, fusing “old-fashioned print culture and literary structure with mass-produced novelty”: “It has the relative shape and feel of a book, the images and oversize words of an advertisement, editorial cartoon, or store catalog, and the iconography of nursery songs and stories” (10–11). As she undertakes her historical analysis of how “the picture book . . . signifies the anxieties and erasures of those who produced it,” her sense of the book’s aesthetics enables a nuanced examination, ever mindful of the fact that form cannot be abstracted from the conditions in which the work was produced. [End Page 305] As the previous sentence begins to suggest, Walter Benjamin is a major influence on op de Beeck’s thinking. Indeed, though she has read widely in both theoretical and historical works, Benjamin’s ideas loom largest. Rigorous but not rigid, she allows her readings to be informed by Marx’s critique of culture, not determined by them. To consider how books featuring “sentient machines” affect the reader’s sense of subjectivity, she extends Benjamin’s insight about (in her words) “intimacy with nonhuman objects, such as the camera, train or the automobile” to picturebooks: if relationships between humans and humans get transposed onto relationships between humans and inanimate things, then we may experience the aura of these things (165, 167). If a picturebook functions as an auratic object, “the picture book normalizes the ways that contemporary child subjects interact with technology,” leading op de Beeck to the following provocative claim: Should people, from a very young age, “be seduced into imagining a human relationship” with an object (such as a machine or a book), this process enables them “to place the inanimate object on equal footing with animate, organic beings (especially those of marginal status, including distant, international others who perform cheap labor)” (167). This neatly ties together her analyses of personified machines in this chapter with the previous one’s consideration of “picture-book ethnography.” In both cases, the picturebook naturalizes ways of abstracting people into objects. But, of course, picturebooks do many more things than that and, in fact, might not do that at all—which she readily acknowledges. What makes her analyses persuasive is a willingness to recognize ambivalence, ambiguity, and the variety of readers that a text may imply or exclude (101). Dr. Seuss’s And to Think That I Saw It on Mulberry Street (1937) “offers a revolutionary first-person address, character development, verbal...

Suspended Animation: Children's Picture Books and the Fairy Tale of Modernity

Suspended Animation: Children's Picture Books and the Fairy Tale of Modernity

Suspended Animation: Children's Picture Books and the Fairy Tale of Modernity (review)

Reviewed by: Suspended Animation: Children's Picture Books and the Fairy Tale of Modernity Julia L. Mickenberg (bio) Suspended Animation: Children's Picture Books and the Fairy Tale of Modernity. By Nathalie op de Beeck. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2010. Suspended Animation stands to make a major contribution to the field of children's literature studies, and its impact will also be felt in American studies, art history, material culture studies, and the history of the book. Nathalie op de Beeck's interdisciplinary study of the modern picture book takes into account the materiality of books themselves (beginning with this volume's own high-quality production and wonderful illustrations, including fourteen color plates); text-picture relationships; the world of popular and mass culture within which the picture book arose; modes of production and manufacture; reading practices; and the balance between avant-garde experimentation and folk nostalgia that is a defining feature of modernity and of the modern picture book. She also grapples with modern conceptions of childhood, which took shape around the same moment as and in conversation with the development of the picture book. Finally, her literary, visual, and historical analyses are informed by nuanced theoretical framing and an eclectic, intriguing array of artistic and literary allusions. This is an ambitious, provocative, and important book. Nathalie op de Beeck's use of "the formalist narratological term 'suspended animation'" alludes to picture books' relation to animation and cinema, arts that developed at the same historical moment as the picture book. According to op de Beeck, "The idea of suspended animation implies technology and alludes to paused images and texts in sequence over a series of pages, an accumulation of information akin to, but distinct from comic strip panels or cinematic reels" (ix). Her subtitle, referring to the "fairy tale of modernity," invokes the fairy tale debates from the early twentieth century that pitted children's librarians against progressive educators: the former—most vocally represented by librarian Anne Carroll Moore—tended toward the belief that children were better served by imaginative literature (including fairy tales); the latter—most vocally represented by educator Lucy Sprague Mitchell—tended to argue that children were better served by works that helped them to understand the urban, industrial world. The "fairy tale of modernity" refers to the way in which picture books balanced both of these concerns. According to op de Beeck, "Picture books of any era constitute a site where young readers inherit a qualified version of the past [End Page 476] and receive a fairy tale, or promise, of lived reality in the future" (xvi). She argues that "the picture book may be the ideal format in which to express the fairy tale of modernity, due to changes in American print culture, the increased ability to mass produce images in affordable texts via offset lithography and the development in thinking of the child as a consumer" (xvii). Following a careful and comprehensive introduction that sets forth the book's fundamental premises and arguments, there are four chapters and a short postscript. Chapter one, "Here and Now Fairy Tales: Old World Tradition and Modern Technology," discusses the modern picture book's emergence in the first decades of the twentieth century in conjunction with technological innovations and several intersecting cultural currents. As op de Beeck notes: Although the picture book signifies modernity, it did not spring fully formed from American publishing houses to libraries, schools, and bookstores. Like its formal and thematic influences in cinema, avant garde poetry, and modernist art, the picture book emerged as a cultural artifact only after decades of artistic ferment and technical experimentation. (10-11) Op de Beeck connects the development of the picture book with the growing tendency to separate children's culture from that of adults. She offers a compelling mix of historical background, theorizing, and nuanced close readings here and in the rest of the book. In her first chapter, op de Beeck focuses on the tension between avant-garde impulses such as those characteristic of the "lost generation" (from whom, she says, the picture book emerged)—including surrealism, psychoanalysis, futurism, and modernist word play—and a nostalgic impulse that likewise infused many modernist experiments. "Picture-book...

Suspended animation: children's picture books and the fairy tale of modernity

Suspended animation: children's picture books and the fairy tale of modernity

Introduction: The European Fairy-Tale Tradition between Orality and Literacy

Introduction: The European Fairy-Tale Tradition between Orality and Literacy Dan Ben-Amos (bio) In fairy godfather: straparola, venice, and the fairy tale tradition, Ruth Bottigheimer proposes to correct the historical narrative of the emergence of the fairy tale in Europe and to recognize “Straparola’s role as an originator in the history of modern fairy tale” (Bottigheimer 2002:3). Giovanni Francesco Straparola (c. 1480–c. 1557) is not exactly an unknown figure in folktale history.1 His book, Le piacevoli notti (Pleasant nights), which appeared in English as The Nights of Straparola (Straparola [1551–1553] 1894), was long recognized as a predecessor of Giambattista Basile’s Lo cunto de li cunti (The tale of tales; published 1634–1636; also known in its 1674 edition as Il Pentamerone) and Charles Perrault’s Contes de ma mere l’Oye (Tales of Mother Goose; Perrault [1695–1697] 1956). As Bottigheimer (2002:2) points out, the Grimm brothers considered Straparola as their precursor, admiring him as an author who conscientiously drew upon oral tradition. Selections from Straparola’s tales appeared in volumes published in Vienna in 1791, which included twenty-four tales, and in Berlin in 1817, which included eighteen tales and was accompanied by the copious notes of the editor and translator Friedrich Wilhelm Valentine Schmidt. In the mid-nineteenth century, Theodor Benfey found in the case of Straparola implicit support for his theory of the Indian origin of folktales. For him, the availability of Straparola’s tales was felicitous evidence for the possible historical interdependence of oral and literate tales. Since the idea that oral tradition alone could sustain a global diffusion of tales was unfathomable in his days, he relied on the migration and translation of the Panchatantra, a classic Indian tale collection, as a support for his Indian origin hypothesis (Benfey 1859). The availability of a European tale collection that demonstrated the possibility of such historical interdependence provided him with further support for his theory. In her book, Bottigheimer rekindles Benfey’s conception of literature as inspiration for oral storytelling, and she proceeds to attribute to Straparola a far greater role in the history of the folktale. She argues that he was not merely a link in the back-andforth transitions between oral storytelling and literature but was an original literary innovator who created a new, previously unknown folktale form—the “rise tale.” Associated with this form, and thematically central to it, is the narrative role of a magical benefactor in human or animal guise; Bottigheimer considers this narrative figure to be Straparola’s literary invention as well. In her view, Straparola acted as an [End Page 373] agent of a newly rising urban middle class and expressed in his “rise tales” its socioeconomic aspirations. While the consideration of folktales as a reflection of social and cultural values has been a staple of folklore research, the proposition that a literary writer originated a folklore form, and created a new narrative role to go along with this form, is revolutionary for the field. Such a clear, precise, and well-defined proposition, which is limited to a specific literary-historical case, could be tested like a scientific hypothesis. Karl Popper proposed that a scientific system “require[s] that its logical form shall be such that it can be singled out, by means of empirical tests, in a negative sense: it must be possible for an empirical scientific system to be refuted by experience” (1959:41). Although Bottigheimer formulates her hypothesis in descriptive rather than logical terms, in her challenging study she offers a rare opportunity for testing a proposition that concerns a critical period in the history of the folktale: the era of the print revolution (see Baron, Lindquist, and Shevlin 2007; Eisenstein 1979, 1983). This was a period in which chapbooks, pamphlets, broadsides, and other forms of popular printing entered the domains of the marketplace, the family room, and the coffeehouse, as well as the community hall and bar, where oral entertainment previously ruled. Regarding the European folktale tradition, print also changed the rules of historical evidence and entrapped folktales in a historical paradox. Chronologically, many literary tales pre-date the recordings of their oral counterparts. In fact, it is...

A Study on the meaning and function of Modern Fairy Tales

A Study on the meaning and function of Modern Fairy Tales

Cinderella Lunar Mission: Everyone Has a Chance to Set Foot on the Moon

The author compares the original story of Cinderella with the modern fairy tale created by the news media in covering the Apollo Program. This comparison builds the basis for the design of Cinderella Lunar Mission, a pseudo-lunar mission consisting, variously, of an installation, fake news reports, a lunar mission network game and real-world action 〈 www.cinderellalunarmission.com 〉. Inspired by Cinderella's glass slipper, the exclusive sign of her identity, Cinderella Lunar Mission examines the idea of shifting identity and ways of fabricating new fairy tales using such digital technologies as programmatic text, network games and barcode identification.

Little Machinery: A Critical Facsimile Edition (review)

Reviewed by: Little Machinery: A Critical Facsimile Edition Eric Bulson Little Machinery: A Critical Facsimile Edition. Mary Liddell. Detroit, MI: Wayne State University Press, 2009. Pp. xiv + 99. $24.95 (paper). Once upon a time, there lived a little boy made from the spare parts of a broken train, trolley, and automobile. No one knew exactly who built him, but Little Machinery, as he was called, never really cared. He was brought into this world without the baggage of family ties and was free to devote himself to a life of adventure, which, strangely enough, always involved a crew of animals ready to capitalize on, some might say exploit, his unusual talents. (Except, that is, for [End Page 448] the beaver who preferred to build his own dam.) And who can blame them? It’s not often that you come across someone with a saw-hand, a foot-wheel (with a drill on the other one), a smokestack on his head, a whistle on his chest, and an insatiable desire for labor. If Little Machinery has a reason to exist, it is this: to work ceaselessly from dawn till dusk so that the animals can live more comfortably. There is no time for thinking unless, of course, it is done for the sake of designing another project. Little Machinery, from which this synopsis was adapted, is Mary Liddell’s fairy tale of modernity, one that was written specifically for “the modern child,” published in 1926 by Doubleday, and, though positively received, soon forgotten. Lucky for us, it has been reprinted in an elegant critical facsimile edition that makes it possible for today’s postmodern child to catch a glimpse of an earlier moment in the history of the machine age. When putting this 62-page picture book together, Liddell adapted the available print technologies and design experiments to her advantage, and, in doing so, she managed to make her one and only children’s book new. Indeed, Little Machinery does have a lot in common with the illustrated books from the previous century, and it does anticipate some of the formal devices adapted by comic book artists in the late 1930s. And yet, when you see the faux advertisements on the front and back cover inserts, the juxtaposition of artisanal and mechanical typeface, and the oversized format (8.125 × 9.375 inches), Little Machinery begins to look a lot like an avant-garde magazine (a “Liddel magazine,” perhaps), something that belongs alongside 391, De Stijl, or Zenit. And why shouldn’t it? If Liddel wanted to make the world intelligible to an audience of young readers, then it makes perfect sense that she would rely on contemporary innovations in graphic design. For this reason, the story of the machine-boy cannot be detached from the technology that made its transmission possible. With the turn of every page, young readers come face to face with words, images, and machine parts that together produce an elegant visual symmetry. Letters get interwoven with or stamped on machine cogs, pictures of nuts and bolts linger in blank white spaces, rabbits, teddy bears, owls, and woodpeckers play in available corners of the frame sometimes breaking through the fourth wall. All the while, the images that spill over the black and red frames of both pages are meant to inspire questions from the curious child (now modernist critic): What is an engine cylinder? How do gearwheels work? How are clothes made? How do you sharpen an eagle’s claws? How do you blow glass? These are the questions that Little Machinery sets out to answer: not why am I here, or where’s my mommy, but how do machines work? In the brief introduction, John Stilgoe identifies the unmistakable influence of the “do-it-yourself” shop-manual that was popular in the first few decades of the century. Machines were fast becoming an integral part of everyday life, and for that reason, adults and children alike relied on shop-manuals for instruction about building and repair. Nathalie op de Beeck, in a brilliant critical essay appended to the back of the volume, provides a comprehensive overview that situates Little Machinery in its social, literary, and historical...

Rasa: A modern fairy tale in two acts

Rasa: A modern fairy tale in two acts

Beverley Naidoo’s The Other Side of Truth: A Modern Fairy Tale of Loss?

Beverley Naidoo’s The Other Side of Truth: A Modern Fairy Tale of Loss?

Stepping into the dark: mourning in Astrid Lindgren’s The brothers Lionheart1

Astrid Lindgren’s juvenile novel, Broderna Lejonhjarta (1973), has enchanted me since I first read it while studying at the University of Alberta. In part, I write this essay to uncover why this story haunts me. More importantly, however, I wonder what young readers of the twenty-first century in Canada, where I live, and in North America generally, might make of this modern fairy tale and its parallel worlds of Lindgren’s childhood Sweden and an imaginary realm of adventure, Nangiyala. How might they read The brothers Lionheart (Lindgren 1985) against conflicts they experience in their own parallel worlds of home and neighbourhood, school, television and the Internet?