The Postmodern Fairytale

The Postmodern Fairytale
Author: Kevin Paul Smith
Publisher: Springer
Total Pages: 205
Release: 2007-07-31
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 0230591701

Why is Shrek one of the greatest selling DVDs of all time? Why are shampoo advertisements based on Sleeping Beauty? Why is it that the same simple stories keep being told? This study attempts to explain why fairy tales keep popping up in the most unexpected places and why the best storytellers begin their tales with 'once upon a time'.

Postmodern Fairy Tales

Postmodern Fairy Tales
Author: Cristina Bacchilega
Publisher: University of Pennsylvania Press
Total Pages: 222
Release: 2010-08-03
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 0812200632

Postmodern Fairy Tales seeks to understand the fairy tale not as children's literature but within the broader context of folklore and literary studies. It focuses on the narrative strategies through which women are portrayed in four classic stories: "Snow White," "Little Red Riding Hood," "Beauty and the Beast," and "Bluebeard." Bacchilega traces the oral sources of each tale, offers a provocative interpretation of contemporary versions by Angela Carter, Robert Coover, Donald Barthelme, Margaret Atwood, and Tanith Lee, and explores the ways in which the tales are transformed in film, television, and musicals.

Fairy Tales Transformed?

Fairy Tales Transformed?
Author: Cristina Bacchilega
Publisher: Wayne State University Press
Total Pages: 302
Release: 2013-11-01
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 081433928X

Scholars of fairy-tale studies will enjoy Bacchilega's significant new study of contemporary adaptations.

The Palgrave Handbook of Magical Realism in the Twenty-First Century

The Palgrave Handbook of Magical Realism in the Twenty-First Century
Author: Richard Perez
Publisher: Springer Nature
Total Pages: 651
Release: 2020-04-30
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 3030398358

The Palgrave Handbook of Magical Realism in the Twenty-First Century examines magical realism in literatures from around the globe. Featuring twenty-seven essays written by leading scholars, this anthology argues that literary expressions of magical realism proliferate globally in the twenty-first century due to travel and migrations, the shrinking of time and space, and the growing encroachment of human life on nature. In this global context, magical realism addresses twenty-first-century politics, aesthetics, identity, and social/national formations where contact between and within cultures has exponentially increased, altering how communities and nations imagine themselves. This text assembles a group of critics throughout the world—the Americas, Europe, Africa, Asia, the Middle East, and Australia—who employ multiple theoretical approaches to examine the different ways magical realism in literature has transitioned to a global practice; thus, signaling a new stage in the history and development of the genre.

Fairy Tales and Feminism

Fairy Tales and Feminism
Author: Donald Haase
Publisher: Wayne State University Press
Total Pages: 292
Release: 2004
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 9780814330302

In the 1970s, feminists focused critical attention on fairy tales and broke the spell that had enchanted readers for centuries. Now, after three decades of provocative criticism and controversy, this book reevaluates the feminist critique of fairy tales.

The Impossible Fairy Tale

The Impossible Fairy Tale
Author: Yu-ju Han
Publisher:
Total Pages: 225
Release: 2017-03-07
Genre: Fiction
ISBN: 1555977669

A chilling, wildly original novel from a major new voice from South Korea The Impossible Fairy Tale is the story of two unexceptional grade-school girls. Mia is “lucky”—she is spoiled by her mother and, as she explains, her two fathers. She gloats over her exotic imported color pencils and won’t be denied a coveted sweater. Then there is the Child who, by contrast, is neither lucky nor unlucky. She makes so little impression that she seems not even to merit a name. At school, their fellow students, whether lucky or luckless or unlucky, seem consumed by an almost murderous rage. Adults are nearly invisible, and the society the children create on their own is marked by cruelty and soul-crushing hierarchies. Then, one day, the Child sneaks into the classroom after hours and adds ominous sentences to her classmates’ notebooks. This sinister but initially inconsequential act unlocks a series of events that end in horrible violence. But that is not the end of this eerie, unpredictable novel. A teacher, who is also this book’s author, wakes from an intense dream. When she arrives at her next class, she recognizes a student: the Child, who knows about the events of the novel’s first half, which took place years earlier. Han Yujoo’s The Impossible Fairy Tale is a fresh and terrifying exploration of the ethics of art making and of the stinging consequences of neglect.

Critical and Creative Perspectives on Fairy Tales

Critical and Creative Perspectives on Fairy Tales
Author: Vanessa Joosen
Publisher: Wayne State University Press
Total Pages: 380
Release: 2011
Genre: Fiction
ISBN: 9780814334522

An intertextual approach to fairy-tale criticism and fairy-tale retellings -- Marcia K. Lieberman's "Some day my prince will come"--Bruno Bettelheim's The uses of enchantment -- Sandra M. Gilbert and Susan Gubar's The madwoman in the attic.

Queer Enchantments

Queer Enchantments
Author: Anne E. Duggan
Publisher: Wayne State University Press
Total Pages: 206
Release: 2013-10-15
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 0814338542

Both film and fairy-tale studies scholars will enjoy Duggan's fresh look at the distinctive cinema of Jacques Demy.

Mapping Fairy-Tale Space

Mapping Fairy-Tale Space
Author: Christy Williams
Publisher: Wayne State University Press
Total Pages: 223
Release: 2021-04-27
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 0814343848

Examines how popular fairy tales collapse narrative borders and reimagine the genre for the twenty-first century. Mapping Fairy-Tale Space: Pastiche and Metafiction in Borderless Tales by Christy Williams uses the metaphor of mapping to examine the narrative strategies employed in popular twenty-first-century fairy tales. It analyzes the television shows Once Upon a Time and Secret Garden (a Korean drama), the young-adult novel series The Lunar Chronicles, the Indexing serial novels, and three experimental short works of fiction by Kelly Link. Some of these texts reconfigure well-known fairy tales by combining individual tales into a single storyworld; others self-referentially turn to fairy tales for guidance. These contemporary tales have at their center a crisis about the relevance and sustainability of fairy tales, and Williams argues that they both engage the fairy tale as a relevant genre and remake it to create a new kind of fairy tale. Mapping Fairy-Tale Space is divided into two parts. Part 1 analyzes fairy-tale texts that collapse multiple distinct fairy tales so they inhabit the same storyworld, transforming the fairy-tale genre into a fictional geography of borderless tales. Williams examines the complex narrative restructuring enabled by this form of mash-up and expands postmodern arguments to suggest that fairy-tale pastiche is a critical mode of retelling that celebrates the fairy-tale genre while it critiques outdated ideological constructs. Part 2 analyzes the metaphoric use of fairy tales as maps, or guides, for lived experience. In these texts, characters use fairy tales both to navigate and to circumvent their own situations, but the tales are ineffectual maps until the characters chart different paths and endings for themselves or reject the tales as maps altogether. Williams focuses on how inventive narrative and visual storytelling techniques enable metafictional commentary on fairy tales in the texts themselves. Mapping Fairy-Tale Space argues that in remaking the fairy-tale genre, these texts do not so much chart unexplored territory as they approach existing fairy-tale space from new directions, remapping the genre as our collective use of fairy tales changes. Students and scholars of fairy-tale and media studies will welcome this fresh approach.