Fairy-tale Scholarship Research Articles

Fairy Tales in Contemporary American Culture: How We Hate to Love Them

Fairy Tales in Contemporary American Culture: How We Hate to Love Them

Nightgown parties

‘Nightgown parties’ is an experimental visual essay featuring a new fairy tale and previously unpublished images, a three-way collaborative ‘party’ between an artist, writer and curator. The curator, Catriona McAra, begins with a compact, comparative preface for the imaginative practices of the artist and writer which intersect at the lost moment of fairy-tale costume. Writer Kate Bernheimer has prepared a new story, ‘The Crown of Stars’ about a found photograph from artist Samantha Sweeting’s childhood, Golden Crown, in which the 4-year-old artist wears fancy dress and appears to be dancing with abandon. McAra argues that, for both, the fairy-tale costume functions as primary matter, with close reference to well-known tales that feature articles of clothing such as Charles Perrault’s ‘Peau d’Âne’ (‘Donkeyskin’), ‘Cinderella’, and ‘Little Red Riding Hood’. McAra’s context for this new tale and image brings together fairy-tale scholarship and costume studies.

Teaching Fairy Tales

Teaching Fairy Tales

Review

Reviewed by: Fairy Tale and Film: Old Tales with a New Spin by Sue Short Shannon Branfield (bio) Fairy Tale and Film: Old Tales with a New Spin. By Sue Short. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015. 218pp. In Fairy Tale and Film: Old Tales with a New Spin, Sue Short vastly expands the definition of fairy-tale film to create a more comprehensive picture of the relationship between fairy tales and contemporary films. Eschewing a more conventional and literal definition, Short looks at the use of fairy-tale motifs in a variety of films not commonly considered fairy-tale films, such as The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo (2011), Battle Royale (2000), and No Country for Old Men (2007). This widened definition allows her to challenge preconceptions about fairy-tale films and to examine the extent to which fairy tales have been transformed in contemporary film and what this reveals about changing societal attitudes and beliefs. With a thorough foundation in fairy-tale film scholarship and a clear understanding of the issues currently under debate, Short respectfully and persuasively argues that fairy-tale scholarship has been too dismissive of popular culture fairy-tale films and has therefore missed many of the interesting and progressive uses of fairy-tale motifs in these films. Rather than merely reinforcing dominant culture values, many of the films examined feature sensitive, compassionate men and independent heroines seeking more than romance, draw attention to the persistent threat of violence against women, present the acquisition of wealth as dangerous and unfulfilling, and explore a variety of gender and family roles. Short uses a genre-based approach to her analysis, looking not just at which fairy tales are being retold but at what genres are being used for these retellings, and she finds strong correlations between tale types and film genres. This genre focus provides the structure for the book. Chapter 1 explores “Cinderella” and “King Thrushbeard” in romantic comedies; Chapter 2 examines “Beauty and the Beast” and an inverted “King Thrushbeard” in coming-of-age comedies; Chapter 3 looks at “Jack and the Beanstalk” and “Ali Baba” in crime dramas; Chapter 4 investigates “Bluebeard” in thrillers; and Chapter 5 analyzes “Snow White,” “Donkeyskin,” and “Hansel and Gretel” in horror; Chapter 6 concludes with a study of postmodern retellings of more literal fairy-tale films. This blend of tale type and genre analysis makes this an excellent book for both fairy-tale scholars interested in a detailed analysis of the varied uses of fairy-tale elements in contemporary film and film scholars [End Page 378] interested in a better understanding of the lasting influence of fairy tales on contemporary film. With the inclusion of nearly 250 fairy-tale films, Short is quite successful at expanding the scope of previous research and analyzing films that have not received due attention. Because of the quantity of films included, Short skillfully weaves summary into her analysis, ensuring that readers will be aware of pertinent details even when they have not seen a particular film, a near certainty given the multitude involved. Although this quantity is an asset to the book, at times Short’s definition is so broad that it is difficult to see where she draws the distinction between fairy-tale film and non-fairy-tale film, especially because intent on the part of the filmmaker is not necessarily required. Although she makes a compelling case for thematic similarities in these films and connects them to traditional fairy tales, she uses many tales that are not well known to the fairy-tale layperson, such as “King Thrushbeard,” which she references repeatedly. Fairy-tale scholarship has often discussed the universal nature of the issues and characters in fairy tales, so a case can also be made that these films address these persistent, universal issues independent of any debt to fairy tales. In a world in which women are most likely to be killed by a husband or a lover, the number of thrillers addressing male violence against women is just as likely to be caused by that real-world fact as it is by an ongoing fascination with “Bluebeard.” Although an examination of parallels between fairy tales and contemporary media is...

Review

Reviewed by: The Golden Age of Folk and Fairy Tales: From the Brothers Grimm to Andrew Lang ed. by Jack Zipes Brittany Warman (bio) The Golden Age of Folk and Fairy Tales: From the Brothers Grimm to Andrew Lang. Edited by Jack Zipes. Indianapolis: Hackett, 2013. 714pp. It is somewhat surprising that a collection of fairy tales with the scope of The Golden Age of Folk and Fairy Tales: From the Brothers Grimm to Andrew Lang has not appeared until now. The nineteenth century was truly the “golden age,” as Jack Zipes dubs it (xvii), of the fairy tale. The form was at its peak of popularity and interest and, spurred on by the somewhat erroneous idea that such tales were quickly disappearing from contemporary life, collection was at an all-time high. Although anthologies of Victorian reworkings of fairy tales exist—see, for example, Michael Patrick Hearn’s Victorian Fairy Tale Book (1988), Zipes’s own Victorian Fairy Tales: The Revolt of the Fairies and Elves (1989), and the more recent Victorian Fairy Tales, edited by Michael Newton (2014)—a collection dedicated to the variety of traditional oral tales collected across Europe during the period is a welcome addition to fairy-tale scholarship. Those with a particular interest in the early attempts at what is now considered the heart of the discipline of folklore will be delighted by what Zipes has gathered. More specifically, the tales range from 1812 to 1919, though only seven tales after 1899 appear. The stories are divided by ATU numbers into eighteen [End Page 115] different categories that contain the most well-known tales, including “Hansel and Gretel” (ATU 327A), “Sleeping Beauty” (ATU 410), and “Cinderella” (ATU 510A). Tales appear from countries we have come to expect to be represented in fairy-tale collections—Germany, Italy, and France—but the collection also includes tales from Hungary, Portugal, Poland, and several other European countries not as well represented in collections printed in English. Each category has at least seven tales, often more, and Zipes provides each with a concise but helpful introduction that describes the “general format” (179) of the tale type and an overview of its history. The tales themselves are annotated, always including the precise nineteenth-century (or, as noted for the later few tales, twentieth-century) source in which the text was found. Every category begins with the earliest Grimm version of the text and, if possible, a later version or two from the brothers as well. Also included in the book is a large variety of less familiar versions of tales, including several by Laura Gonzenbach and Giuseppe Pitrè, both of whom Zipes first translated relatively recently in Beautiful Angiola: The Lost Sicilian Folk and Fairy Tales of Laura Gonzenbach (2003) and The Collected Sicilian Folk and Fairy Tales of Giuseppe Pitrè (2008), respectively. I was excited to discover many tales and tellers I had never come across before—indeed, it is claimed that more than a few texts appear here in English for the first time, though which titles specifically are curiously not indicated. Tales previously unfamiliar to me, however, include Theodor Vernaleken’s “The Release from the Enchanted Sleep” (placed with the “Sleeping Beauty” tales but interestingly full of details from other tale types as well) and Ernst Ludwig Rochholz’s “Death of the Seven Dwarfs” (an odd “Snow White” [ATU 709] in which seven dwarfs are killed for housing a peasant girl presumed to be their mistress). Although the organizational tactic that privileges the Grimms reveals certain interpretational biases on Zipes’s part regarding the Grimms’ position as inspiration for the rest of fairy-tale collection in Europe, Zipes makes a strong case for this decision in his introduction by arguing that, although “the Grimms were not the first scholars to turn their attention to folk tales,” they “played a significant part in a widespread cultural trend and set high standards for collecting folk tales that marked the work of most European and American folklorists up through the twentieth century” (xvii), facts that few would deny. The text also contains an in-depth introduction by Zipes that mainly covers the reasons behind the Grimms’ study and collection of...

Oral fairy tale or literary fake? Investigating the origins ofLittle Red Riding Hoodusing phylogenetic network analysis

The evolution of fairy tales often involves complex interactions between oral and literary traditions, which can be difficult to tease apart when investigating their origins. Here, we show how computer-assisted stemmatology can be productively applied to this problem, focusing on a long-standing controversy in fairy tale scholarship: did Little Red Riding Hood originate as an oral tale that was adapted by Perrault and the Brothers Grimm, or is the oral tradition in fact derived from literary texts? We address this question by analysing a sample of twenty-four literal and oral versions of the fairy tale Little Red Riding Hood using several methods of phylogenetic analysis, including maximum parsimony and two network-based approaches (NeighbourNet and TRex). While the results of these analyses are more compatible with the oral origins hypothesis than the alternative literary origins hypothesis, their interpretation is problematized by the fact that none of them explicitly model lineal (i.e. ancestor-descendent) relationships among taxa. We therefore present a new likelihood-based method, PhyloDAG, which was specifically developed to model lineal as well as collateral and reticulate relationships. A comparison of different structures derived from PhyloDAG provided a much clearer result than the maximum parsimony, NeighbourNet or TRex analyses, and strongly favoured the hypothesis that literary versions of Little Red Riding Hood were originally based on oral folktales, rather than vice versa.

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. …

Review

Reviewed by: Reading, Translating, Rewriting: Angela Carter’s Translational Poetics by Martine Hennard Dutheil de la Rochère Michelle Ryan-Sautour (bio) Reading, Translating, Rewriting: Angela Carter’s Translational Poetics. By Martine Hennard Dutheil de la Rochère. Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 2013. 374pp. It is widely known that Angela Carter’s interest in the fairy tale spanned from her fictional rewritings in The Bloody Chamber (1979) to her role as editor of The Virago Book of Fairy Tales (1990) and The Second Virago Book of Fairy Tales (1992). She read the fairy tale across many languages and cultures. However, with the notable exception of Anna Watz’s article, “Angela Carter and Xavière Gauthier’s Surréalisme et Sexualité” (2010), which acknowledges Carter’s involvement with Surrealism through translation, Carter’s practice of translation has often been relegated to the background of criticism. Martine Hennard Dutheil de la Rochère’s Reading, Translating, Rewriting: Angela Carter’s Translational Poetics (2013) challenges this tendency by placing translation at the foreground of Angela Carter’s engagement with the fairy tale. Carter’s writing was vast and varied, ranging from nonfiction, essays, and journalism to translation, editing, book reviews, short stories, theater, performance texts, radio plays, novels, short stories, and poetry. Her reading was as diversified as her writing, moving beyond geographic, linguistic, and cultural boundaries to draw from multiple traditions. For example, Maggie Tonkin’s Angela Carter and Decadence: Critical Fictions/Fictional Critiques (2012) and Rebecca Munford’s Decadent Daughters and Monstrous Mothers: Angela Carter and the European Gothic (2013) attest to a growing recognition of Carter’s debt to European literature; both critics acknowledge the ambiguities that arise from Carter’s eclectic sources and the resulting textual hybridity and cultural interplay in her writing. Such transnational, translingual, and transgeneric migrations of narrative are essential territories for fairy-tale scholarship. Hennard investigates the contours of these different “trans” in relation to Carter’s deep relationship with the cross-cultural imagination through the lens of translation. Hennard cites the work of Homi K. Bhabha (1994), as she explores how translation not only underlies the dissemination of fairy-tale narrative but is also intertwined with a sense of in-betweenness in Carter’s writing. She demonstrates how translation feeds Carter’s poetics on many levels, even extending beyond text into territories of intermedial and intersemiotic production. For Hennard the practice of translation is intertwined with creation, as it allies creative reading with creative writing (2). The word translation expands in meaning throughout Hennard’s study, as she redeploys the term to propose fresh insights into Carter’s engagement with the fairy tale. The book provides an extensive introduction and first chapter that investigate the range of Carter’s reading and translation practices and examine Carter’s numerous “French connections,” often integrating striking discoveries from the [End Page 158] Angela Carter archive housed at the British Library. Hennard’s research attests to her extensive knowledge of the field of fairy-tale studies yet maintains an astonishing level of readability. The work is accessible to undergraduate and graduate students, while at the same time proposing observations that will interest the most experienced fairy-tale scholars. There is also close attention to textual detail, an essential aspect of any work that deals with translation. The work, however, is not limited to the practice of translation as such but also places emphasis on how this activity informs Carter’s poetics. Hennard investigates different tale versions, with chapters dedicated to texts known as “Little Red Riding Hood,” “Bluebeard,” “Puss in Boots,” “Sleeping Beauty,” “Beauty and the Beast,” and “Cinderella.” In each chapter she explores Carter’s readings, writings, and translations as a web of intertwined works that can be read collectively. Hennard also places these works in the tradition of textual production, editing, and research on fairy-tale texts, with a concentration on Carter’s evolving relationship with the work of Perrault and Jeanne-Marie Leprince de Beaumont. The headings for each chapter attest to patterns of contextualization and textual metamorphosis. For example, the title of Chapter 2 is “Updating the Politics of Experience: From ‘Le Petit Chaperon rouge’ to ‘Little Red Riding Hood’ and ‘The Company...

Critical & Creative Perspectives on Fairy Tales: An Intertextual Dialogue between Fairy-Tale Scholarship and Postmodern Retellings

Critical & Creative Perspectives on Fairy Tales: An Intertextual Dialogue between Fairy-Tale Scholarship and Postmodern Retellings

<em>Hoodwinked!</em> and <em>Jin-Roh: The Wolf Brigade</em>: Animated “Little Red Riding Hood” Films and the Rashômon Effect

Riding (ATU 333), a deceptively simple narrative about a young girl and her grandmother who are beset by a wolf and sometimes rescued by a woodsman, has been adapted by a plethora of creators. The results include novels, short stories, children's literature, comic books, television productions, cartoons, video games, and advertisements as well as films - shorts and feature length, animated and live-action, humorous and serious, creative and formulaic, and sometimes even erotic or outright pornographic.1 With the possible exception of Hansel and Gretel (ATU 327A), no other international traditional fairy tale has offered filmmakers such extensive opportunities for examining crime, criminals, criminality, and criminal justice.2 In previous studies in this area, we addressed feature-length, live-action, present-day-setting Riding crime films. We have also considered movies that seek an adult audience and use the story to explore such issues as corruption, pedophilia, and serial murder (see Greenhill and Kohm, Riding Hood and the and 'Little Riding Hood' Films; Kohm and Greenhill, Pedophile Films and Crime Films). Unlike the recent teensploitation/ werewolfsploitation Riding Hood (2011, dir. Catherine Hardwicke) or the many Red movies for children, the films we have examined offer complex reflections on current issues of crime and justice.We turn now to two otherwise quite dissimilar films: Jin-Roh: The Wolf Brigade and Hoodwinked! Jin-Roh (1999, written by Mamoru Oshii and directed by Hiroyuki Okiura) is a Japanese anime reflection on an apocalyptic past/present; the film is intended for adults. In the film Germany has won World War 11, and corrupt militaristic elites in the Special Unit of the Capital Police and the Public Security government branch seek power for its own sake. The antigovernment resistance uses young girls, called Riding Hoods, as couriers to run weapons and explosives. Capital Police member Kazuki Fuse observes the suicide of one such Riding Hood. Amid rumors of a secret police group called the Wolf Brigade, the suicide's sister gives Fuse her copy of Rotkappchen. Their voiceover narration of the tale punctuates the primary narrative. Their unlikely relationship leads to a tragic denouement, with no woodsman in sight, more reminiscent of Perrault's version than of the Grimms' version of ATU 333. 3In contrast, Hoodwinked! (2005, written and directed by Cory Edwards, Todd Edwards, and Tony Leech) is a child-friendly film featuring Little Riding Hood and her grandmother as cookie capitalists:Furry and feathered cops from the animal world investigate a domestic disturbance at Granny's cottage, involving a girl, a wolf, and an axe. The charges are many: breaking and entering, disturbing the peace, intent to eat, and wielding an axe without a license. Not to mention, this case might be tied to the elusive Goody Bandit who has been stealing the recipes of goody shops everywhere. (Edwards)These two films have in common thematic connections to ATU 333 and crime as well as their animated format. A perhaps less obvious commonality, though, is that both also narrate different characters' stories about criminal acts, invoking the perspective of Akira Kurosawa's Rashomon (1950) and the cinema of interpretation (Boyd).4 The relevance to fairy-tale scholarship of considering these three films together goes beyond simply drawing links between the tale type, the two ATU 333 adaptations, and the Japanese classic. It fosters exploration of modes of storytelling connecting fairy-tale, filmic, and legal discourses. Moreover, these films offer popular explications of the so-called Rashomon effect - a term used by legal scholars and others to underscore the often elusive nature of truth itself (e.g., Kamir). But we also examine how analysis of legal- and justice-related fairy-tale and film discourses can influence fairy-tale studies. …

Critical and Creative Perspectives on Fairy Tales: An Intertextual Dialogue between Fairy-Tale Scholarship and Postmodern Retellings (review)

Critical and Creative Perspectives on Fairy Tales: An Intertextual Dialogue between Fairy-Tale Scholarship and Postmodern Retellings (review)

Critical and creative perspectives on fairy tales: an intertextual dialogue between fairy-tale scholarship and postmodern retellings

In and Creative Perspectives on Fairy Tales: An Intertextual Dialogue between Fairy-Tale Scholarship and Postmodern Retellings Vanessa Joosen broadens the traditional concept of intertextuality to include academic texts. With three key texts from the 1970s at the center of her discussion-Marcia K. Lieberman's Some Day My Prince Will Come, Bruno Bettelheim's The Uses of Enchantment, and Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar's The Madwoman in the Attic-Joosen connects the critical views expressed in these feminist and psychoanalytic interpretations with fictional fairy-tale retellings and illustrations that have been published in Dutch, English, and German since the 1970s. While readers may not automatically connect fairy-tale retellings and criticism, Joosen argues that they represent a similar conviction to understand, interpret, criticize, and experiment with the original tale. Moving through her three critical focus texts in chronological order, Joosen addresses fairy-tale retellings in prose, poetry, and pictures, including revisions of Snow White, Cinderella, Sleeping Beauty, Hansel and Gretel, Little Red Riding Hood, and Beauty and the Beast. Authors and illustrators whose work is discussed include Paul Biegel, Anthony Browne, Gillian Cross, Emma Donoghue, Iring Fetscher, Ad?le Geras, Otto Gmelin, Wim Hofman, Anne Provoost, Anne Sexton, Barbara Walker, and Jane Yolen.Joosen argues that retellings and criticism participate in a continuous and dynamic dialogue about the traditional fairy tale, but on different terms. Critical and Creative Perspectives on Fairy Tales offers many insights into the workings of fiction and criticism that will appeal to fairy-tale scholars, literature scholars, and general readers interested in intertextuality and fairy tales.

Fairy Godfather, Fairy-Tale History, and Fairy-Tale Scholarship: A Response to Dan Ben-Amos, Jan M. Ziolkowski, and Francisco Vaz da Silva

Abstract This article is a response to criticisms of my thesis that Giovanni Francesco Straparola invented the rise fairy-tale plotline in 1550s Venice. In order to clarify and support the argument that I made in my 2002 book, Fairy Godfather, I here make efforts toward establishing a common terminology, critiquing the parameters of Proppian structural analysis, and revising the trope of women-as-storytellers. I affirm the importance of sociohistorical studies of publishing, editing, and patterns of literacy for understanding the emergence and spread of rise fairy tales. I refute arguments for the existence of rise fairy tales in the ancient world and in the Middle Ages. In addition, I offer further explanations of how print technology, widespread schooling, and economic change brought about the emergence of rise fairy tales in Renaissance Venice, and to account for the post-1789 spread of rise fairy tales among European and non-European populations, I cite increasing literacy in rural areas.

Fairy Godfather , Fairy-Tale History, and Fairy-Tale Scholarship: A Response to Dan Ben-Amos, Jan M. Ziolkowski, and Francisco Vaz da Silva

This article is a response to criticisms of my thesis that Giovanni Francesco Straparola invented the rise fairy-tale plotline in 1550s Venice. In order to clarify and support the argument that I made in my 2002 book, Fairy Godfather , I here make efforts toward establishing a common terminology, critiquing the parameters of Proppian structural analysis, and revising the trope of women-as-storytellers. I affirm the importance of sociohistorical studies of publishing, editing, and patterns of literacy for understanding the emergence and spread of rise fairy tales. I refute arguments for the existence of rise fairy tales in the ancient world and in the Middle Ages. In addition, I offer further explanations of how print technology, widespread schooling, and economic change brought about the emergence of rise fairy tales in Renaissance Venice, and to account for the post-1789 spread of rise fairy tales among European and non-European populations, I cite increasing literacy in rural areas.

Red Riding Hood and the Wolf in Bed: Modernism's Fairy Tales by Ann Martin

MLR, I03.2, 2oo8 525 Red Riding Hood and the Wolf inBed: Modernism's Fairy Tales. By ANN MARTIN. Toronto and London: University of Toronto Press. 2oo6. ix+ I99 PP. ?32. ISBN 978-o-8020-go86-7. The malleability of the fairy tale is, today, an almost taken-for-granted assumption in academic circles. So, for Ann Martin to suggest thatcertainmodernist writers re fashion thebetter-known European fairy tales (she focuses specifically on versions of 'Sleeping Beauty', 'SnowWhite', 'Cinderella', 'LittleRed Riding Hood', 'Beauty and theBeast', and 'The Fisherman and hisWife' popularized by theGrimms, Perrault, and de Beaumont (p. i6)) is a less than novel argument. Were this the underlying thesis ofMartin's book, itcould simply be tossed on the pile marked 'unoriginal' in the increasing gamut of fairy-tale scholarship. However, from the outset Martin is concerned with elaborating the dichotomy in early twentieth-century responses to the fairy tale. The premiss upon which her argument rests is that thedominant conception of childhood isone ofnostalgic recon struction foran inevitably lost time (hereMartin needs tobe precise that this isnot the Romantic view of childhood but a perversion thereof). This is then connected with a popular view of 'folk' culture as representative of amore primitive yet 'authentic' stage of development. In stark contrast to this, Martin suggests thather three representatives ofmoder nism-James Joyce,Virginia Woolf, and the often-neglected Djuna Barnes-utilize the fairy tale as an aperture throughwhich the chaotic experiences ofmodernity can be renegotiated. ForMartin, the fairytale isa dynamic narrative: at one level itcan be viewed as ameans to propagate themores of a given society, at another itsadaptabi litycan be seen as interrogatingquestions of social and cultural significance. It is this dynamism, Martin argues, which accounts for the fairytale's appeal to thesewriters. Integral toher concept of dynamism is the sheer number of literary fairy tales that Martin states are available forconsumption at the turnof thecentury.As each author encodes many variations, the ensuing profusion undermines notions of authority and fixityofmeaning. Juxtaposing versions of 'Sleeping Beauty' enables Clarissa Dalloway to explore thepotentialities of her own identity; thedifferentversions of 'Cinderella' which Joyce inflects inUlysses suggest a range of available plot structures and charac terizations; for Matthew O'Connor inNightwood 'Little Red Riding Hood' provides a narrative which suggests the transformative possibilities of deception and disguise. Martin argues that thesewriters use the fairy tale not to prescribe social identities but rather to represent a subject who takes advantage of 'unscripted interventions' (P. 125) to explore the experience ofmodernity and capitalist consumer culture. Yet an appreciation of Martin's adroit argument must be temperedwith a reserva tion: her theoretical position isdependent upon the identification and interpretation of variation and, while from the outset she states she will limitherself to a few fairy tales, thisnarrow scope is a severe constraint and, potentially, could be read as point ing to the possible cultural pre-eminence of particular versions of these tales.None the less, over the course of the book Martin makes a convincing argument for the alignment of the fairy talewith the experience ofmodernity in theworks of these authors. Reading the fairy tale as offering 'interpretative possibilities' (p. i i6) (a position that is,arguably, not exclusive to thisgenre) allows thesemodernist writers to free the tales of their links to amythic past, instead deploying them as narratives of exploration in amodern, consumer age. BIRMINGHAMCITY UNIVERSITY SARAH WOOD ...

Fairy Tales and the Art of Subversion, and: When Dreams Come True: Fairy Tales and Their Tradition (review)

Reviewed by: Fairy Tales and the Art of Subversion, and: When Dreams Come True: Fairy Tales and Their Tradition Deborah Stevenson Zipes, Jack Fairy Tales and the Art of Subversion. 2nd ed. Routledge, 2006254p Trade ed. ISBN 978-0-415-97669-5$95.00 Paper ed. ISBN 978-0-415-97670-1$25.95 Zipes, Jack When Dreams Come True: Fairy Tales and Their Tradition. 2nd ed. Routledge, 2007322p illus. with photographs Paper ed. ISBN 978-0-415-98006-2$95.00 Much has happened since the first editions of both these titles, Fairy Tales first appearing in 1983 and When Dreams Come True in 1999. Renowned scholar Zipes has therefore returned to these well-known works and given them both an overhaul and additional material (two chapters in the first book plus an updated bibliography, and four essays in the second). The former is one of the key works of fairy-tale scholarship in our time, and the latter contains essays from a variety of titles to which readers might not have independent access, so their updates are likely to prove worthwhile to those interested in folktales and folktale-based fiction. Copyright © 2007 The Board of Trustees of the University of Illinois

Hypertextual Gutenberg. The Textual and Hypertextual Life of Folktales and Fairy Tales in English-Language Popular Print Editions

The study proceeds from the premise that simultaneous changes occurring over the last three decades in fairy-tale scholarship, literary studies, and technology have generated notable changes in the production and reception of folktale and fairy-tale texts. In particular, a new understanding of the printed tale's textual complexity and intertextuality emerged simultaneously with the phenomenon of hypertextuality. Against this background, the paper shows how popular print editions in English approximate the special features of hypertext.

Fairy Tales and Feminism: New Approaches (review)

Fairy and Feminism: New Approaches. Edited by Donald Haase, Series in Fairy-Tale Studies. Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 2004. 268 pp. As I have sketched it, the agenda for feminist fairy-tale scholarship parallels in large measure the agenda for fairy-tale studies itself (31). With this statement, editor Donald Haase closes his excellent survey of feminist fairytale scholarship, the first essay in this volume. Haase's statement is telling in that while Fairy and Feminism brings together a reevaluation of the feminist critique of fairy tales, it simultaneously attempts to lay a path for what has been, and will be, the contemporary study of the fairy tale. Simultaneously restricted and enhanced by its feminist focus, Haase's collection, stemming originally from an issue of Marvels & Tales: Journal of Fairy-Tale Studies (14.1 [2000]), is an excellent representation of the current status of fairy-tale studies as well as a review of the scholarship of fairy tales and feminism since discourse in this area came to critical notice in the 1970s. This volume uses the umbrella of feminism to bring together a wide range of critical approaches and to cross national and textual boundaries. Ruth B. Bottigheimer's essay provides a historical dimension to the fictional and critical stereotype of the fairy-tale heroine in its investigation into the effects of the historical changes in women's control over their fertility in Europe. Lewis C. Seifert too engages the European tale in his work on seventeenth-century French literary tales by women. Like Bottigheimer, as well as Jeanine Blackwell, who examines the literary tales of German writers, Seifert moves beyond the simple examination of women's tale telling as subversive and asks scholars to delve into the ambiguities and contradictions contained in these texts. Having grounded the volume where fairy-tale studies have long been contained-in Europe and in historical studies-Haase then allows the work to move intertextually and internationally beyond where studies of classic European tales (e.g., those of Bruno Bettelheim, Bengt Holbek, Maria Tatar, and even Bottigheimer herself) have so usefully taken fairy-tale scholarship. At this point however, I must note that any reference to Holbek's work is in large part missing from the volume, including the otherwise admirably extensive bibliography of citations used in the essays and fairy-tale scholarship published since 1970 that is included at the end of the collection (213). While Holbek may not have written a women-centered work, I would argue that his psychoanalytic approach as well as his useful (if debatable) schema of feminine active versus masculine active tales warrant inclusion in such a bibliography. This exclusion points to the fact that despite the best efforts of Haase and the authors included in the volume, any centered approach (feminist, psychoanalytic, etc.) may attempt to resist one-dimensional views (x-xi) but can never fully move beyond them once so centered. Regardless of what may have been left out, it is of course Fairy and Feminism's feminist locus that gives it its power and usefulness not only in fairytale studies but in feminist and literary studies as well. While still Euro- and Anglo-American centered, Elizabeth Wanning Harness essay Women's Autobiography and Fairy Tales and Kay Stone's Fire and Water mark the transition in the volume from a European locus and premodern focus to contemporary versions of tales and an international scope. Harries, like Blackwell, asks the reader to examine female responses to fairy tales. In fact, one might argue that as a whole, this volume is less concerned with fairy tales themselves and far more focused on female and feminist responses to them. …

Fairy tales and feminism: new approaches

In the 1970s, feminists focused critical attention on fairy tales and broke the spell that had enchanted readers for centuries. By exposing the role of fairy tales in the cultural struggle over gender, feminism transformed fairy-tale studies and sparked a debate that would change the way society thinks about fairy tales and the words happily ever after. Now, after three decades of provocative criticism and controversy, this book reevaluates the feminist critique of fairy tales. The eleven essays within Fairy Tales and Feminism challenge and rethink conventional wisdom about the fairy-tale heroine and offer new insights into the tales produced by female writers and storytellers. Resisting a one-dimensional view of the woman-centered fairy tale, each essay reveals ambiguities in female-authored tales and the remarkable potential of classical tales to elicit unexpected responses from women. Exploring new texts and contexts, Fairy Tales and Feminism reaches out beyond the national and cultural bound aries that have limited our understanding of the fairy tale. The authors reconsider the fairy tale in French, German, and Anglo-American contexts and also engage African, Indian Ocean, Iberian, Latin American, Indo-Anglian, and South Asian diasporic texts. Also considered within this volume is how film, television, advertising, and the Internet test the fairy tale's boundaries and its traditional authority in defining gender. From the Middle Ages to the postmodern age - from the French fabliau to Hollywood's Ever After and television's Who Wants to Marry a Millionaire? - the essays assembled here cover a broad range of topics that map new territory for fairy-tale studies. Framed by a critical survey of feminist fairy-tale scholarship and an extensive bibliography - the most comprehensive listing of women-centered fairy-tale research ever assembled - Fairy Tales and Feminism is a valuable resource for anyone interested in the intersection of fairy tales and feminism.

Feminist criticism and the fairy tale

In the large corpus of fairy-tale scholarship since the 1960s, feminist criticism has contributed substantially to analysing, interpreting and evaluating the Grimm tales. At the same time, fairy tales have been rewritten countless times with an explicit or implicit feminist agenda. A comparison between ‘Snow White’ adaptations and emancipatory criticism shows that fairy-tale criticism and fairy-tale retellings have often addressed similar issues. Garrison Keillor's ‘My Stepmother, Myself’, for instance, shares with Andrea Dworkin a distrust of the prince's fascination with Snow White (both accuse him of necrophilism), and with Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar shares a defence of the stepmother as a victim of patriarchy. In retellings like Keillor's, a double intertextual dialogue can be reconstructed. On the one hand, there is the explicit intertextual link with and a critique of the Grimm tale of ‘Snow White’. Due to the fact that Keillor expresses issues raised by Dworkin and Gilbert and Gubar, the reader can establish a second, implicit intertextual link between Keillor's text and feminist fairy-tale criticism. However, Keillor's feminist agenda is ambivalent. Although his retelling definitely raises readers’ awareness about problematic issues in the Grimm tale, it can also be read as a critical parody of overtly polemical or self-reflexive feminism.