Fairy-tale World Research Articles

Grounded: The Adventures of Rapunzel by Megan Morrison (review)

Reviewed by: Grounded: The Adventures of Rapunzel by Megan Morrison Kate Quealy-Gainer, Assistant Editor Morrison, Megan Grounded: The Adventures of Rapunzel. Levine/Scholastic, 2015 [384p] Trade ed. ISBN 978-0-545-63826-5 $17.99 E-book ed. ISBN 978-0-545-64270-5 $17.99 Reviewed from galleys R* Gr. 5-8 Morrison’s version of Rapunzel has no interest in being rescued, thank you very much, and she’s perfectly content to stay in her tower where her every need is met by her beloved Witch. So when Jack Beanstalker manages to trick Rapunzel out of her tower, she’s desperate to get away from the filthy “grounded” peasants and back to her elevated home; however, a powerful Red Fairy captures Rapunzel and tasks her with finding the Woodmother. Terrified that the fairy will kill Witch, Rapunzel agrees, and with Jack as her guide and her long braid in tow, she travels across the land of Tyme, facing down fearsome magical creatures and merciless bandits. It’s the revelations of the Woodmother, however, that end up being the greatest challenge to Rapunzel as she learns uncomfortable truths about herself, her history, and Witch. Morrison has a deft hand with both world-building and pacing, carefully constructing the geography and various politics of the fairy-tale world of Tyme in between chase scenes, bridge collapses, narrow escapes, and bargains with all sorts of devious beings. Rapunzel and Jack have an easy, witty banter going as they quest, adding a much appreciated dollop of humor to their tale, but the beating heart of this story lies with Rapunzel, whose love for Witch remains steadfast even as she discovers the woman’s monstrous deeds. Their final encounter is a devastating display of the complexities of love and the virtue of forgiveness, giving this fractured fairy tale a surprisingly deep emotional element. Fans of the recent Maleficent and readers who are wise enough to understand that there is more than one side to a story will find this to their liking. Copyright © 2015 The Board of Trustees of the University of Illinois

Visitor behaviour and profitability of Turkmenbashi World of Fairytales in Turkmenistan

Purpose – This paper aims to discuss visitor behaviour and net present value (NPV) of the only theme park in Turkmenistan – Turkmenbashi World of Fairytales. Design/methodology/approach – Visitor behaviour, in terms of allocating time and expenditure to different parts of the theme park, is analysed using time and cost blocks. The data from a questionnaire answered by 317 visitors are employed in the descriptive analysis of visitor behaviour. The data on visitor behaviour are also incorporated into an estimation of the theme park’s net present value, as well as its sensitivity and scenario analyses. Findings – The results show that the park is mostly visited by young people, at the time before noon or after 4 p.m. A majority of the visitors do not spend a significant amount in the theme park. Hence, achieving positive NPV may require improved revenue growth. Originality/value – Turkmenbashi World of Fairytales is one of few publicly owned theme parks in the world. This provides a unique opportunity to test if positive NPV plays any role in construction of a public theme park.

Big Bad Detective Agency by Bruce Hale (review)

Reviewed by: Big Bad Detective Agency by Bruce Hale Kate Quealy-Gainer Hale, Bruce Big Bad Detective Agency; written and illus. by Bruce Hale. Scholastic, 2015 [128p] Trade ed. ISBN 978-0-545-66537-7 $15.99 Paper ed. ISBN 978-0-545-66538-4 $4.99 E-book ed. ISBN 978-0-545-74728-8 $15.99 Reviewed from galleys R Gr. 2-4 Wolfgang the wolf will fess up to stealing a chicken or two—or maybe twenty—but he’s pretty sure the moniker of Big Bad Wolf just isn’t fair. When the Three Little [End Page 311] Pigs (who are not little at all but hefty porkers running a construction business) accuse Wolf of breaking into their houses, the royal guard gives Wolf until sundown to either confess or find the real culprit. He reluctantly teams up with Ferkel, the Pigs’ little brother and an aspiring detective, to solve the mystery and clear himself. Their encounters with various suspects provide the most giggleworthy moments here, especially for readers familiar with the original tales. Hansel and Gretel, for example, are not sweet neglected children but surly teenage thieves; Ursula the witch is in love with one of the seven dwarfs; Jack of beanstalk fame is more a klutz than a trickster; and Puss in Boots is hilariously feline, hissing and glaring disdainfully at Ferkel and Wolf as they try to interrogate him. Simple sentences and repeated phrases give this easy reader plenty of accessibility, while the occasional challenging word offers more independent readers an opportunity to stretch their skills. Cartoonish black and white art depicts lively critters and a refreshingly diverse human population for a fairy-tale world. Readers will be happy to return for Wolf and Ferkel’s next big case. Copyright © 2015 The Board of Trustees of the University of Illinois

Türk Masallarında Varoluşçuluk Tasarımı Üzerine Bir Deneme

Fairy tales are irrational narratives which hold rational elements in their structures. Fairy tales are intertwined with life on the contrary of being disconnected from life; because fairy tales tell about people to people. In the existentialist movement where the existence of human beings is questioned, existence is individual; in other words it is subjective and human beings are tackled with all their aspects. Existentialism has taken advantage of literary genre go give tangibility to its ideas. Abstract ideas have been strengthened, fictionalized and have entered into daily life with flat characters in various literary works. In this sense, as Existentialism is a ‘human’ based philosophical movement, it is also in harmony with the fairy tale world, which emulates daily life and is full of symbolic messages, and its fictional adventure. However, fairy tales are texts which are more didactical and have apparent end. Eventually, these are the kinds of texts which are open to reception and analysis of its symbolic language with the protagonists that are distant representatives of the human beings who have been stereotyped without detail in time and descriptive figures. In this study, it has been laid emphasis on Existentialism design in Turkish fairy tales with reference to philosophy – Existentialism, philosophy – literature; literature- philosophy, fairy tale – Existentialism with the symbolic language and ‘Reception Aesthetic’ view. Thus, we have come across with fairy tale flat characters or fairy tale protagonists who have an ‘existentialist’ struggle to become a protagonist in the fairy tales that have been studied in the frame of ‘symbolic language and background’ with an interdisciplinary approach

Fairies & Witches

Fairies & Witches Cay Dollerup (bio) The Irresistible Fairy Tale: The Cultural and Social History of a Genre Jack Zipes Princeton University Press http://press.princeton.edu/titles/ 256 Pages; Paper, $19.95 Jack Zipes, the foremost American scholar of the world of fairy tales, opens his book with a brief reference to recent interest in fairy tales in scholarship and the genre’s proliferation in the media which demonstrate the unique impact fairy tales have on our lives. Zipes states that it is impossible to provide any date or, for that matter, any approximation of a date for the “birth” of the fairy tale, a genre which depends on “the symbiotic relationship of oral and literary currents.” This leads to an exploration of the origins of human communication in which it is argued that all narratives are driven by the urge to be in power, to be relevant and are hence elitist. It is emphasised that the precursors of fairy tales related to belief systems, represented shared experience preserved in the oral tradition. Tracing themes of conflict, notably as they cast a light on the dark side of human life, Zipes cautiously points to Sumerian precursors and then pays full attention to the Greek fables attributed, rightly or wrongly, to Aesop (c. 600 b. C.). He sees fables as stories of animals involved in human conflicts and he tries to identify fairy tale elements. He goes in depth concerning the literary versions of Puss-in-boots from the 16th and 17th centuries the origins of which reach back to India. Employing Richard Dawkins’s theory of memes (a meme being a unit in cultural transmission), Zipes suggests that fairy tales are created out of pools of memes and are instruments used to preserve instinctual morality in changing environments. The French term conte de fées, “fairy tale,” was coined by Baroness d’Aulnoy for stories she wrote and narrated in the salons of Paris in 1690-1710. She recycled much material that existed both in the oral tradition as well as in literature and Roman-Greco myths and tales. So did her contemporaries, mostly women who appropriated narratives involving fairies and other fantastic beings in alternate worlds outside the confines of the state and the church which, in their tales, were portrayed as weak. It is argued that the spectacles of Italian opera exerted some influence on the fantastic narratives, and Zipes refers to d’Aulnoy’s own life (and those of many other women) for the importance of midwives, nannies as real-life fairies who were of paramount importance as protectors of girls and women in many cultures. Homing in on the French author Charles Perrault’s Bluebeard, Zipes notes that this story, possibly the first written narrative about a serial killer, has a life of its own and is more well-known than the author. Elements from the story had been circulating long before 1695. It has been remade thousands of times both in literature and in other media. Zipes sees this as “part of a discursive process of remakings within the larger genre of the fairy tale.” In the same fashion that tales should be understood in their contemporary context, remakes should be so too. This is illustrated in a discussion of the French director Catherine Breillat’s Bluebeard (2009). It is concluded that whereas the first tale bears the imprint Perrault’s personality, experience and age, Breillat subtly changes Perrault’s male dominance and female curiosity in her film. Retellings of the theme will continue to be made as long as there are serial killers but they will also reflect changed mores. Zipes turns attention to the nature of fairies and witches. He considers them as the mimetic seeds spread by pagan goddesses that have been transformed into benevolent and malevolent powers by misogynistic cultural processes. With an excursus on the Russian narrologist Vladimir Propp in which Zipes emphasises that Propp’s research was never subject to Soviet censorship, he homes in on the Slavonic, specifically Russian character of Baba Yaga. Baba Yaga appears in thousands of tales as an unpredictable power which seems to have antecedents in “Mother Earth” and who metes out gifts, rewards...

Diminutive Catastrophe: Clown’s Play

Diminutive Catastrophe: Clown’s Play

Les aléas de l’utopie canadienne: figures et représentations dans la littérature et le cinéma ed. by Marie-Lyne Piccione, Bernadette Rigal-Cellard

l’Encyclopédie,” while O’Dea carefully traces the conflicting meanings of the term ‘philosophe’ throughout Rousseau’s work in “Soundings: the Word ‘philosophe’ in Rousseau’s Works and Correspondence.” The section ends by turning to politics with Kiyotaka Kawai’s “Rousseau citoyen de Genève et sa critique du système représentatif.” Part three, “Dialogues et confrontations,” zeroes in on specific debates. Two essays focus on Diderot: Carole Martin’s “Formes de l’empathie chez Rousseau et Diderot” (which successfully uses reproductions of Dürer and Vivant Denon to illustrate a complex theory about specularity), and John T. Scott’s “Another Dangerous Supplement: Diderot’s Dialogue with Rousseau in the Supplément au voyage de Bougainville.” Maria Leone’s “La nouvelle Héloïse et ses lecteurs philosophes ” shows how Rousseau integrated the problem of reception into his novel; together with Perrin’s and Volpilhac-Augers’s essays, it opens up a rich discussion of the hermeneutics of reading in Rousseau. Julia Simon turns the debate over to doux commerce in “Rousseau and the Philosophes on Commerce,” while Nathan Martin opens it onto music in “Rousseau and the Philosophes on Music History.” Martin Stern concludes the section with a reflection on the trope of conversion (“‘Voilà la véritable philosophie’: les conversions de Rousseau comme clef d’intelligibilité de sa relation aux ‘philosophes’”). The volume closes with Hulliung’s survey of the ‘Enlightenment wars’ of the twentieth century, and an invitation to move the discussion forward by looking back at Rousseau’s dispute with the philosophes. Ohio State University Louisa Shea PICCIONE, MARIE-LYNE, et BERNADETTE RIGAL-CELLARD, éd. Les aléas de l’utopie canadienne: figures et représentations dans la littérature et le cinéma. Pessac: PU de Bordeaux, 2010. ISBN 978-2-86781-691-8. Pp. 234. 18 a. This collection of twenty-four articles was published in the series “Gulf Stream,” dedicated to the study of the cultures and literatures of North America, the Caribbean, Ireland, and the United Kingdom. Along with three other books, it is a result of four years of research by faculty at University of Bordeaux and other French universities. With the exception of one essay on an Anglophone author , this work analyzes multiple permutations of utopia and dystopia in Francophone Canadian literature and film of the last fifty years. Acknowledging the difficulty of defining the term ‘utopia,’ the editors have chosen to organize the essays into three metaphorical divisions: “La source,” “L’arbre,” and “L’horizon.” The first treats the original notion of utopia and early utopias specific to Canada. The second illustrates the range and variety of utopian dreams, and the third demonstrates their elusive and often disappointing nature. In “La source,” Piccione considers four works by Michel Tremblay that describe an ideal Saskatchewan, his mother’s birthplace. The two essays by Danielle Latour-Lefort stand out: the first traces the theme of utopia in fifteen works of Antonine Maillet; the second analyzes Pélagie-la-Charrette, in which the exiled Acadians live according to the rules of an ideal society in their journey toward their idealized homeland. Turning to poetry, Yannick Resch finds that for Gaston Miron, utopia is in the heart of the poet. In the final two articles of “La source,” Daniel Marcheix finds in Sergio Kokis’s La gare a metaphor for contemporary Reviews 579 Quebec, and studies the protagonist’s desire to know and understand the Other (in this case, Hassidic Jews) in Myriam Beaudoin’s Hadassa. In “L’arbre,” Emmanuelle Quéré studies enchanted gardens in works by Gabrielle Roy and Marco Micone, and in a second essay, analyzes the fairy-tale world in several novels by Jacques Poulin and Michel Tremblay, where cats converse with and help their human companions. Antony Soron explores the cultural disconnect experienced by a Haitian immigrant in Laferrière’s satirical Comment faire l’amour avec un nègre sans se fatiguer. Marie-Pierre Andron and Christiane Albert treat quests for mythical utopias in the works of Sylvain Trudel; Marie-Béatrice Samzun analyzes dystopia in works by Gaétan Soucy, and Daniel Marcheix infers a utopian discourse in Jacques Savoie’s Un train de...

“With a smile and a song …”: Walt Disney and the Birth of the American Fairy Tale

Following the premiere of Walt first full-length animated feature, Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs (1937, dir. William Cottrell and David Hand), New York Times film critic Frank S. Nugent hailed the film as significant cinematically as D. W Griffith's Birth oj a Nation (One Touch of 5). Indeed, for a picture that was labeled Disney's folly because of the costs the studio had to defend, version of the fairy tale of the lost princess and seven little men became the highest grossing film of 1938, earning more than $5 million in the first year of its release (Nugent, This Disney Whirl 5). Disney was awarded a special Oscar for Snow White in 1938, a true testament to its high level of popularity and critical acclaim.Disney's connection to the fairy-tale world is now well established, with the studio receiving similar levels of acclaim for their productions of Cinderella (1950, dir. Clyde Geronimi, Wilfred Jackson, and Hamilton Luske), The Little Mermaid (1989, dir. John Clements and Ron Musker), Beauty and the Beast (1991, dir. Gary Trousdale and Kirk Wise), and their latest installment, Tangled (2010, dir. Nathan Greno and Byron Howard), a loose retelling of the Grimms' version of Rapunzel. However, despite its many accolades, scholars have struggled with adaptation of classical fairy tales.Because of the seemingly innocent nature of Disney animation and its subsequent association with childhood through fairy tales and because of prominent position within the paradigm of popular culture, scholars have identified Disney films as somehow worthy of special treatment. In their analytical work From Mouse to Mermaid, Elizabeth Bell, Lynda Haas, and Laura Sells highlight the challenges faced by those wanting to engage in analysis of Disney films. They argue that legal institutions, film theorists, cultural critics and loyal audiences all guard the borders of Disney film as 'off limits' to critical enterprise (3). Steven Watts identifies this tension as a conflict between popularity and critical reception. He argues that Disney's enormous popularity has contributed to dismissal in critical circles. Commercial success has been viewed in inverse proportion to cultural significance (84). The problem with Disney seems to be the paradoxical underlying notion that populist sentiment cannot be viewed in unison with cultural importance. As such, many of the current works on Disney are deductive in nature, analyzing any Disney animated production in exclusive, not inclusive, terms.However, the tide seems to be turning in favor of constructive scholarship on Disney. Eleanor Byrne and Martin McQuillan's recent analysis of the later animated productions of Disney introduces a new notion for animation scholars to consider. They argue, We must not just ask questions about Disney, we must ask questions about the questions we ask about (3). As our society changes sociologically, economically, and politically, the terms of critical engagement with these texts must also necessarily change.Douglas Brode was one of the first Disney scholars to examine Disney animation in a positive light and to take these terms of engagement into consideration. In his work From Walt to Woodstock: How Disney Created the Counterculture, Brode highlights an illuminating fact. The evolution of ideology in Disney animation in the 1930s and 1940s was crucial to the formation of a radicalized value system that played a key part in the youth revolution of the 1960s (Brode, Walt 6). The importance of Brode's scholarship lies in recognizing the underlying importance of the values transmitted through Disney animation and their far-reaching consequences. In his later work Multiculturalism and the Mouse: Race and Sex in Disney Entertainment Brode puts the live-action and animated films of Disney under analysis and argues how these features and shorts actually helped to foster tolerance of diversity in American society. …

Burning Bluebeard (review)

Reviewed by: Burning Bluebeard Joshua Takano Chambers-Letson Burning Bluebeard. By Jay Torrence. Directed by Halena Kays. The Neo-Futurists, Chicago. 30 December 2011. On 30 December 1903, during an afternoon matinee of a pantomime, Mr. Bluebeard, Chicago’s Iroquois Theatre went up in flames. The fire killed over 600 audience members, mostly women and children, and one performer. In an ensemble piece written by Jay Torrence and presented by Chicago’s Neo-Futurists, Burning Bluebeard followed a group of six lightly singed and smoking clowns as they tried to reconstruct this doomed final performance of the pantomime, this time hoping to avoid the fire. Iroquois stage manager Robert Murray (Torrence) described the cast’s primary objective thus: to “create a fairy tale for you . . . [and] put a happy ending in a room.” In the intimate performance space of the Neo-Futurarium, the company deployed ludic moments of clown work, pop-inflected dance drama, and fragmented narrative strategies in order to seduce the audience into their recreation of the matinee. But as the production built in momentum toward the fated first scene of the second act, against the best intentions of the company, the show veered once more off the rails and into the fire pit. With the same commitment that it gave to the onstage creation of a fairytale world, the Neo-Futurists revived the most disastrous theatre fire of modern history in all its visceral horror, casting us in the role of that ill-fated audience. Burning Bluebeard was as much about the imaginative capacity of the theatre to forge worlds on-stage as it was a study of the dark underside of a [End Page 603] theatrical relationship that ultimately disciplines the audience into a dangerously docile form of spectatorial subjectivity. One of the dominant trends in politically oriented modern theatre is the deployment of fragmentation and self-conscious theatricality to produce a reflexive and critically engaged audience. Burning Bluebeard calls this strategy into question with a tacit admission that even these strategies often result in an audience that is so seduced by the magic of a performance that it becomes submissive and inactive, even against its own impulse for self-preservation. In many ways, this relationship between performer and audience is resonant with Thomas Hobbes’s description of the tie that binds a sovereign to its subject: obedience for protection. All too often, Western audiences submit to the performers, obediently seated, facing forward, and silent; they do so knowing that whatever ills befall the characters are reserved for the stage only. But in the case of Burning Bluebeard, it was precisely by giving in to the spectacle onstage that the audience was lulled into a horrifying death. Click for larger view View full resolution The ensemble in Burning Bluebeard. (Photo: Evan Hanover.) The nearly ninety minutes of the performance flew by at a frenzied pace as the clowns shifted between earnest enthusiasm and abject terror, piecing together and restaging the pantomime from traumatically fragmented memories. Four of the six clowns were based on members of the original Mr. Bluebeard company, including Murray; others were fictional creations, manifestations of the company’s wish to produce a spectacular dramatic event. This was the case with Molly Plunk’s pixieish Faerie Queen, who silently pranced around the stage while overseeing moments of stage magic that included the transformation of a ladder into aerialist Nellie Reed’s (Leah Urzendowski) high-wire act, or the raising of a full moon with the help of shimmering lights and a painted, wooden moon mask. The company repeatedly assured us that they only wanted to provide us with a “safe, happy ending.” Dazzled by the earnest insistence of the actors, playful dramaturgy, and moments of imaginative illusion (such as the aerialist act), many of us in the audience were charmed into giving them the chance to achieve this goal, in spite of the fact that they all but assured us of our pending incineration. Everything drove toward act 2, scene 1, the moment when Mr. Bluebeard ended and the fire began. The fire sequence was paradigmatic of the Neo-Futurists’ virtuosic ability to use the stage to realize a captivating, sensory-rich experience. Smoke...

The Melancholic Mermaid by K. George

George, Kallie. The Melancholic Mermaid. Illus. Abigail Halpin. Vancouver: Simply Read Books, 2010. Print. Upon reading a plot summary of Kallie George’s The Melancholic Mermaid, you might first wonder if you’ve read the book before. Humans befriending mermaids, outsiders uniting, and children learning that their differences make them special are all plots that have been told and retold in a variety of mediums. It will be no surprise to readers that, though Maude the two-tailed mermaid has twice the speed, twice the strength, and twice the grace, these same qualities isolate her from the other mer-children. Similarly, when two-legged Tony’s webbed hands are revealed, an unlikely friendship with Maude is inevitable. However, while the plot and themes rarely venture outside established cliché, there are two aspects of The Melancholic Mermaid that not only make it well worth the read but push it over and above similar fare. Firstly, George’s poetic rhythms perfectly capture the lulling melancholy of the seashore. At times, she dances the line between poetry and prose, evoking the rolling tides of a calm day at the beach. Of particular note is her command of alliteration, which when well-executed, rarely fails to captivate children and draw them into a fairy tale world. Secondly, Abigail Halpin’s illustrations are positively breathtaking. Her use of colour, space, and contrast are all wonderful to behold and do a remarkable job of highlighting the settings and mood of George’s story. While the scenes on land are depicted in vibrant purples and reds, the seashore is dominated by calm and subtle shades of blue and green. If you are the type to choose a book by its cover, The Melancholic Mermaid should most certainly be a popular choice. The high quality of the illustrations make The Melancholic Mermaid a great book for beginning readers to grow into, and it will be ideally suited for children transitioning from picture books into shorter chapter books. While the story features both male and female protagonists, it will most likely hold a broader appeal for girls than for boys. Recommended: 3 out of 4 starsReviewer: Amy Paterson Amy Paterson is a Public Services Librarian at the University of Alberta’s H. T. Coutts Education Library. She was previously the Editor of the Dalhousie Journal of Interdisciplinary Management and is very happy to be involved in the Deakin Review and the delightful world of children’s literature.

Clever Jack Takes the Cake (review)

Reviewed by: Clever Jack Takes the Cake Deborah Stevenson Fleming, Candace . Clever Jack Takes the Cake;; illus by G. Brian Karas. Schwartz & Wade, 2010. 40p Library ed. ISBN 978-0-375-95697-3 $20.99 Trade ed. ISBN 978-0-375-84979-4 $17.99 R 5-8 yrs. Jack may be poor, but he’s determined to join the other children of the realm at the princess’ tenth birthday party. He therefore makes a luscious cake, decorated and decked with candles, for the birthday girl. Unfortunately, on the long trip to the palace, he’s beset by birds, a troll, a dancing bear, and a hungry guard, each of whom take a portion of the cake, leaving Jack facing the princess emptyhanded— or so he thinks. It’s a little hard that poor starving Jack deprives himself for a frippery and goes back to scarcity at the end, but otherwise this is an amiable folktale-modeled adventure. Its traditional structure provides rhythm and clarity, and audiences will enjoy the cameo appearances from lore favorites such as fourand- twenty blackbirds and a lone bridge troll. Karas interprets this folkloric world through his own inimitable style; there’s actually a touch of game landscape to Jack’s winding path through the neatly spaced obstructions, and his homey, rough-hewn style adds a touch of accessibility to the magical fairy-tale world and tapestry-hung palace. The conclusion—Jack’s story of his adventures is the best gift of all—sets the book up conveniently as an entrée to a discussion of favorite stories and best gifts, even if listeners secretly (or not so secretly) think the princess would rather have had that cake. [End Page 74] Copyright © 2010 The Board of Trustees of the University of Illinois

Hollywood, Black Animation, and the Problem of Representation in Little Ol’ Bosko and The Princess and the Frog

This article focuses on the dialogues within and between Disney’s The Princess and The Frog and a 1930s animated series about a young Black boy—Little Ol’ Bosko. Both films feature Black characters who navigate a fairy tale world set in the swamps of southern Jim Crow era America in which they grapple with fears about reductive and demeaning black film stereotypes. Although they are in some ways trapped within the white gaze of the film’s meaning, I argue that in their fantasies, both Bosko and Tiana outmaneuver the regime of representation that underlies racial stereotyping, opening a space for trans-coding and revision of its meanings. In addition, a comparison of the films demonstrates a clear improvement from the 1930s in terms of an increased differentiation in the representation of Black Americans, acknowledging, if not embodying, the fact that “Black America” is a diverse and complex reality.

Wishing for Tomorrow (review)

Reviewed by: Wishing for Tomorrow Deborah Stevenson McKay, Hilary. Wishing for Tomorrow; illus. by Nick Maland. McElderry, 2010 [288p]. ISBN 978-1-4424-0169-3 $16.99 Reviewed from galleys R Gr. 5–8 Though this is labeled a sequel to Burnett’s A Little Princess, it isn’t simply a what-happened-next, it’s also a complementary view of the Edwardian classic. The narrative here follows the left-behind girls, especially Sara’s special friend Ermengarde, little protégé Lottie, and nemesis Lavinia, at Miss Minchin’s Seminary now that Sara has headed off into her glamorous new life and communicates only by letters. McKay doesn’t entirely reject the fairy-tale world Burnett created, but she brings her spirited, humorous contemporary view and unique ebullience (McKay fans will particularly recognize the comic intensity of the group dynamics and the barely controlled chaos of the child clan) to the scene. She also straightforwardly addresses some of the awkward questions contemporary readers may ask about the original work: how do the unhappy girls not included in Sara’s escape feel? What is to be done with the class-limited but beloved kitchen maid Becky (McKay marries her off while Sara privately acknowledges her relief at that solution)? How did they all get there, and doesn’t anybody really care about these girls? The result is a more complex and realistic work than its original, with understanding generated for even unsympathetic characters and a willingness to acknowledge Sara as less than perfect. Mostly it’s about change, as girls and teachers find in Sara’s altered circumstances either a reminder of their own stasis (Miss Minchin secretly drinks, haunted by the memory of Sara) or an impetus to move into a new direction themselves (Miss Amelia resumes a shy flirtation with the vicar, while Lavinia launches herself at the escape presented by a university education). Fans of Burnett, especially those a few years on from their initial read, will find this an interesting comment on as well as companion to the initial story, while McKay followers starting here may find this sends them back to the original work. Copyright © 2010 The Board of Trustees of the University of Illinois

My Fair Godmother (review)

Reviewed by: My Fair Godmother Jeannette Hulick Rallison, Janette My Fair Godmother. Walker, 2009311p ISBN 978-0-8027-9780-3$16.99 R Gr. 7-10 Sixteen-year-old Savannah's just been dumped by hunky, smart Hunter in favor of Jane, her equally intelligent older sister. As hurt Savannah plots revenge, Chrysanthemum "Chrissy" Evenstar, a teenaged "fair godmother" (because her grades in Fairy Godmother School "were just, you know, fair") in need of an extra-credit project, appears unexpectedly and offers Savannah three wishes. Savannah first wishes "that somehow my life could be like a fairy tale. You know, with a handsome prince waiting for me at the ball, and that somehow when I meet him, everything will work out happily ever after," but Chrissy misinterprets the request, actually turning Savannah into Cinderella and plunging her smack into the old-world milieu of that tale. Savannah's remaining wishes are also misunderstood, and the last drags a fellow student and track team member, Tristan, into the medieval fairy-tale world, where he must be made a prince before he may return to his own place and time. Rallison's writing is zippy and light as well as frequently humorous; Savannah and Tristan are eminently likable and the specific outcomes of their various dilemmas are not always easily foreseen, keeping the details of the plot fresh rather than boringly predictable even as their eventual pairing grants the expected happy ending. Teens looking for a breezy read with a fairy-tale bent will lap this up, and they may gain a little useful perspective on relationships and loyalty at the same time. Copyright © 2009 The Board of Trustees of the University of Illinois

THE WEREWOLF IN LATGALIAN FOLKLORE

Latgale is the essentially most different and most peculiar Latvian region from the perspectives of language and culture and their interaction with the cultures of other nations. Hence, this article attempts to reveal how the images of werewolves in Latgalian folklore and the means of their expression used in traditional tales differ from the rest territory of Latvia. The aim of the article is to understand the use of this relatively little studied mythical image and the features of their characters in Latgalian folklore. Previously, the author studied the features of werewolf depictions in Latvian folklore in general, and also compared it to Lithuanian folklore. The main source used in the research are five tales of werewolves, which can be found in an electronic version of Pēteris Šmits’ collected fairy tales and tales on http://valoda.ailab.lv/folklora/pasakas/saturs.htm, recorded in the dialect of the Eastern part of Latvia. Different dictionaries and encyclopedias, for example the „Interpretative Dictionary of the Latvian Language” („Latviešu valodas skaidrojošā vārdnīca”) (http://www.ailab.lv/Vardnica/), the „Dictionary of Latvian Etymology” (“Latviešu etimoloģijas vārdnīca”), the „Encyclopedia of Mythology” (“Mitoloģijas enciklopēdija”), and the „Dictionary of Foreign Words” (“Svešvārdu vārdnīca”) were used to describe the symbolical and etymological meaning of a werewolf image. The main methods used in the paper are semiotic and comparative. The semiotic method is used to explain the symbolical meaning of the werewolf image and the semantics of the word. The comparative method is used to compare the comprehension and interpretation of the werewolf image in the tales written in the Latvian and Latgalian languages, as well as to compare the structure of these tales and the use of artistic means of expression. As the result of the research, it is possible to conclude that the Latgalian tales of werewolves show features that both agree with and differ from tales of other regions. However, the means of expression in the Latgalian tales of werewolves are rather different from texts written in other regions. One of the major differences is the language which the tales are written in, as well as emotionally expressive elements in the colloquial speech of the narrators, such as the lexis of the region, dialectisms, similes, hyperbolization, and russicisms.Just like in the majority of tales from other regions, special introduction and conclusion formulas are used. The introduction formula takes the listeners into the world of fairy tales and magic, and the conclusion fromula brings them back into reality. In addition, the use of particular toponyms to gain the effect of credibility is quite common. The motive of shapeshifting wedding guests in a number of Latgalian tales is more characteristic and more common in Lithuanian folklore, but not in the folklore of other Latvian regions. Only in one of the analyzed tales a person turns into a werewolf of his own free will. What’s more, he is not a Latgalian, which subtextually implies dislike and prejudices against an alien, which is relatively typical of Latgalian folklore in general. Also, a special shapeshifting formula – a curse – is found in one tale only. Few techniques are mentioned for retrieving human form – jumping over another shot werewolf’s skin, eating a piece of bread given by a human, or cross-cutting a wolf’s skin. Among these methods the bread technique is the most common also in the tales from other Latvian regions. Also, it should be noted that the word „werewolf” is mentioned in one tale only and an expressive description of a werewolf’s appearance is missing. This probably means that this character was not very popular in Latgalian folklore, which is also proved by the small quantity of these texts. Only one tale is narrated by a man, whereas male narrators are predominant in the other regions. In addition, in some Latgalian tales there are relatively distinguished features of patriarchy, relationships between the rich and the poor, and a peculiar sense of humor for this region and its means of expression. Having conducted the research of the tales of werewolves it is quite safe to assert that the narrator’s place of residence and the region that he/she comes from has a relatively essential meaning in the choice of folkloristic motives. The social and cultural environment, the language, and mutual relations are those preconditions that form a person’s weltanschauung, perception of life and basic values. With their special mentality, emotionally colorful means of expression and an exciting, different language, the Latgalian tales are for sure distinctive from the other ones and are very important for Baltic folklore in general.

Disastrous Aesthetics: Irony, Ethics, and Gender in Barthelme’s Snow White

The observer ought to be an amorist. --Kierkegaard (47) From the opening of Donald Barthelme's Snow White, the reader is confronted with the question of the aesthetic and its seemingly ironic relation to gender. The text begins: SHE is a tall dark containing a great many spots: one above the breast, one above the belly, one above the knee, one above the ankle, one above the buttock, one on the back of the neck. All of these are on the left side, more or less in a row, as you go up and down: [dot] [dot] [dot] [dot] [dot] [dot] (3) Certainly it makes all the sense in the fairy-tale world that a like Snow White should have beauty spots, but within this seemingly self-evident opening passage are confronted with a series of difficult aesthetic, linguistic, and ideological questions. First, note a grammatical slippage in the word beauty--initially used as a noun, then as an adjective. However, this slippage, easy enough to deal with and explain linguistically, leads directly to higher-order questions. Is Snow White beautiful because of the spots--do the spots make her beautiful? Or are the spots seen as beautiful because they are attached to such a beauty--does she make them beautiful? Is the word spots even right here, or should it give way to the more postmodern marks? Or, conversely, is the whole question of here a merely tautological one--if she's a (whatever that may mean), then she's ipso facto got beauty spots. If do have a tautology, is it an enclosure out of which the novel cannot lift itself? Can aesthetics progress from this linguistic question? Can Barthelme's version of Snow White properly begin? Perhaps as compensation for the problems inherent in the word beauty, the reader is next invited to picture Snow White's through the marks that rest not so coincidentally near her fetishized erogenous zones: breast, belly, knee, ankle, buttock, neck. To assist the reader in attempting to conjure up an aesthetic image of Snow White's marks, there's a helpful representation provided in the text. However, this series of bullets on the left side of the page manages only to disrupt or frustrate the reader's representational desire and, in the process, links this frustrated desire to the failure of the word or category beauty--to the tautology that, let us say, opens the text or, perhaps, (fore)closes it as it attempts to begin. Unable to climb toward the light of the signified, remain exposed to the uncertainty of the signifier. This problem concerning meaning, which dogs all of Barthelme's Snow White, seems to rob textual or aesthetic production of its traditional privilege and put it on the same level as other cultural productions. This postmodern situation, in turn, troubles traditional aesthetic thinking on at least three registers: first, it robs aesthetics of its role as arbiter of taste and value; second, it collapses the aesthetic distance that is absolutely essential for a traditional notion of aesthetic judgment; (1) finally, and perhaps most cripplingly, such a leveling gesture robs aesthetics of its proper object--after Warhol, how to tell the difference between a disposable commodity and enduring art? But as Dan the dwarf puts it in Snow White's most famous passage, there may be a way for aesthetics to continue from the point where its founding distinctions are irremediably blurred, from the point where art cannot separate itself from trash: at such a point, you will agree, the question turns from a question of of this trash to a question of appreciating its qualities.... And there can no longer be any question of disposing of it, because it's all there is, and will simply have to learn how to dig it--that's slang, but particularly appropriate here. (97) Here have all the ingredients for a familiar reading of aesthetics in Snow White and Barthelme's project on the whole: Barthelme, it seems, asks us to consider an ironic aesthetic stance as compensation for the absence of a transcendental signified; whatever may think of trash, we will simply have to learn how to 'dig' it. …

Spatial Representation in European Popular Fairy Tale

Using selected examples, this article investigates the problem of spatial representation in European fairy tales and brings together a number of elements for a systematic analysis of its significance for narration. Aesthetic space, which Ernst Cassirer (30) distinguishes from mythical and theoretical space, constitutes in a general sense an artistically presented reality. The virtual space in narrative art, particularly in the folktale, can be regarded as such an aesthetic space, but one is not independent of the narrators personality and context (i.e., the narrator's performance), of the story's narrative perspective, of national or regional variants, or of oral and written adaptations. The European fairy tale creates two nonhomeomorphic worlds-a magical world of supernatural beings from the beyond, and a nonmagical one of normal human beings-worlds are divided from one another through occasionally fluid but sometimes also inflexible boundaries and frontier regions. With this first structure a second coexists in for the narrator and the listener both worlds belong in any case to the same magic virtual world of the fairy tale, which is clearly separated from their own real one. Between the areas of the here and the beyond there are crossings and frontier regions such as a bridge, river, pond, seashore, well or spring, stone, forest, thorns, and so on. The forest is a passage-way of particular importance. Its name alone (forest, wood) seems to characterize a scenic court (Meder 123). It is regarded, in both the real and metaphorical sense, as a place of mortal danger and forbidden desires (140).1 It is represented negatively as an antithesis of courtly urban society and linked to the stereotypical adjectives dark, huge, and lonely. And yet it is not always possible to distinguish, in the Euclidian sense, the spatial areas of the real and the other world. On the contrary, we are confronted with a fabled shifting of spheres. For example, when the hardworking daughter in the fairy tale Frau Holle (AT 480) is down in the underworld making the bed and energetically shaking out the bolster so that the feathers fly, then it is snowing in the world.2 And the vertical movement of the daughter's jump into the well is at variance with the horizontal movement of her homecoming, which happens not by arduous climbing up out of the depths, but simply by stepping out of the otherworld (Heindrichs 64). While the printed fairy tale relies solely upon linguistic means for spatial construction, the oral storyteller, who performs the tale and uses the additional elements made possible by performance, is able to transform the narrative space (composed of the narrator and the audience) into the narrated scene of the fairy-tale action, to make it visual. He does this by employing not only linguistic means of narration3 but also gestures and significant movements, and by using props or models to illustrate and visualize the story being told: the wine glass he moves back and forth across the table is at one moment the ship on which the hero sails the seas, at another an animal. In this way the space surrounding the storyteller is re-created as the world of adventure (Karlinger 266). At the beginning and end of the fairy tale the two worlds are at variance, and their synthesizing has to be established by narrative or by formula. A Breton storyteller, for example, achieves this in an amusing way at the end of his narrative by asserting he had never had a share of the wedding feast; instead, he had been given a kick sent him flying through the air to land in the chair he was now sitting in.4 His rhyming conclusion draws attention away from the fairy tale to the teller of tales, from the world was being described to the world of the narrator. Whereas the formulas at the beginning set the narrated fairy-tale world in a faraway place and a far-distant time in the past, the formulas at the end serve, among other things, to collate this narrated world with the world of the storyteller, the narrated space with the narrating space (Koll 3). …

Narrative models in Tolkien's stories of middle-earth

In The Lord of the Rings (1954), there is an attempt to unite the two worlds which captivated Tolkien’s imagination: the fairy tale world of children’s stories which he was drawn to as a child, and the sagas and medieval myths that were the subject of his study and teaching at university. The hobbits are where these two narrative universes meet. In The Lord of the Rings, these two worlds, being difficult to reconcile, collide. On the one hand, we have the hobbits, those everymen with whom the reader can identify easily. They are characters created in The Hobbit (1937) that have a narrative world of their own, as in fairytales, and that are generated with a low mimetic mode. On the other hand, we have the chivalric heroes with a great literary tradition, who belong to the high mimetic mode. Tolkien’s fiction is less successful in those episodes in which the hobbits are absent.

The Poets' Grimm: 20th Century Poems from Grimm Fairy Tales (review)

Reviewed by: The Poets’ Grimm: 20th Century Poems from Grimm Fairy Tales Wolfgang Mieder The Poets’ Grimm: 20th Century Poems from Grimm Fairy Tales. Edited by Jeanne Marie Beaumont and Claudia Carlson . Ashland, OR: Story Line Press, 2003. 287 pp. This anthology of twentieth-century fairy-tale poems is a publishing desideratum finally come true. My own compilation entitled Disenchantments: An Anthology of Modern Fairy Tale Poetry (Hanover, NH: UP of New England, 1985) has been out of print for a number of years, and it was high time that someone undertook the necessary task of editing a new collection of this fascinating subgenre of lyric poetry. Jeanne Marie Beaumont and Claudia Carlson have put together a superb anthology, and they are to be commended for their careful and sensitive selection of poems. They have purposely stayed away from duplicating authors and poems from my earlier anthology. In fact, only 14 of the 78 authors included in Disenchantments also appear (usually with different texts) in The Poets' Grimm, with the latter volume featuring poems by 112 poets. This handsomely produced book with its fairy-tale-like low price is thus a treasure throve of fairy-tale poetry, a volume designed for the general reader but also most suitable for the classroom. Disenchantments had found considerable use in English and folklore classes, especially in Women's Studies courses, Honors programs, and first-year special topics seminars. There is no doubt that this new and more comprehensive anthology would be a perfect textbook, and I hasten to urge its adaptation both on the advanced high school and college level. The two editors provide a mere six-page introduction, arguing convincingly that earlier fairy-tale poetry usually consisted of retellings of commonly known fairy tales, to wit poems by Alfred Tennyson, Bret Harte, John Greenleaf Whittier, and James Whitcomb. This modus operandi changed at the beginning of the twentieth century, when poets well versed in the fairy-tale tradition started to reinterpret the tales or parts of them in innovative and thought-provoking fashion. As I have argued in my entry on "Poetry and Fairy [End Page 331] Tales" in Jack Zipes's The Oxford Companion to Fairy Tales (Oxford: Oxford UP, 2000), "the basic message of most 20th-century poems based on or at least alluding to fairy tales is one that this is a world of problems and frustrations, where nothing works out and succeeds as in these beautiful stories of ages past. And yet, by composing their poems around fairy-tale motifs, these authors if only very indirectly seem to long for that miraculous transformation to bliss and happiness" (388). This is certainly very obvious in the fairy-tale poems of some of the best English-language poets as, for example, Randall Jarrell, Anne Sexton, Sara Henderson Hay, Olga Broumas, Hayden Carruth, Louise Glück, Galway Kinnell, Maxine Kumin, Lisel Mueller, Allen Tate, and Jane Yolen. As expected, these poets are represented in The Poets' Grimm, but the editors have also included many less-known poets, among them Regie Cabico, Mike Carlin, Anna Denise, Meg Kearney, Elline Lipkin, Margaret Rockwell, Maria Tarrone, and Estha Weiner. For the most part, these poets and the many other authors who have written one or more fairy-tale poems reinterpret the Grimm tales in a humorous, parodic (at times nonsensical), ironical, cynical, or satirical fashion, thereby turning the positive wisdom of the tales into so-called anti-fairy tales. The themes of the poems are as universal as the insights into the human condition expressed in the traditional tales. Every imaginable human or social problem is treated, from love to hate, from politics to war, from marriage to divorce, from decency to criminality, and from sexual politics to emancipation. But there are also themes of deception, vanity, loneliness, manipulation, lovelessness, manipulation, frustration, and power. The happy ending of the fairy tales is transformed to express the complexities and anxieties of the modern age that seems far removed from the world of fairy tales. But it is the juxtaposition of the original tales with the innovative interpretations in these poems that leads to effective and insightful poetic communication. There is indeed something for everyone in...

The status of arete in the Phaeacian episode of the Odyssey1

The figure of Arete has often been seen as problematic as her presentation by Nausicaa and Athena leads to expectations concerning her importance which are apparently not met. This article presents various theories concerning the significance and role of Arete in the Phaeacian episode and suggests that the importance of Arete is to be seen as connected with the significance of Scherie as a borderland between the real world and the fairy tale world of Odysseus’ travels.