A poetics of postmodernism: History, theory, fiction

This thesis presents a theoretical discussion of meaning creation in general, and interpretive functions of English adjectives in particular. The discussion rests on a dynamic view of meaning and i ...

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Interpretive Functions of Adjectives in English: A Cognitive Approach

This essay examines Baudelaire's use of the figure of child in his theorization of the flâneur , and it argues for the possibility of a specifically child flâneur by considering New York children's literature like Enright's The Saturdays , Fitzhugh's Harriet the Spy , Konigsburg's From the Mixed-up Files of Mrs. Basil E. Frankweiler , and Hamilton's The Planet of Junior Brown .

Children's Literature and the Child Flâneur

Traditional fairy tales, as we know them from the collections of Charles Perrault, the Grimm Brothers, and Andrew Lang, consist of a mixture of magical and realistic elements. As the fairy tale is recycled in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries, many of the traditional stories are adapted to current literary models. The novel, as one of the dominant literary genres, becomes the model to which the fairy tale is frequently assimilated, especially when adolescents or adults are the intended audience. The influence of realistic literature and magic realism is perceptible in fairy-tale retellings for all ages. Magic is one of the typical fairy-tale features that disappear or take on new guises in late twentieth-century retellings, inconsistencies are resolved, historical contextualization, and character description increase. A decline of the magical is perceptible, but the supernatural does not disappear completely. Authors exploit the coincidence as an ambiguous space between magic and realism, or make ample use of stylistic and narrative devices such as metaphors, similes, or unreliable narrators to give a new dimension to elements that formerly belonged unambiguously to the realm of the supernatural. Questioning the realistic nature of fairy-tale elements seems to miss the point of the genre. That is because when we read fairy tales we enter what Anne Wilson calls "magical thought," a magic mode: "Magical thought is the level of thought we all engage in when we are not making the effort to think rationally and imaginatively so as to deal effectively with the external world. It is effortless, spontaneous and solipsistic, wholly free from the laws and realities of the external world" (139). The very phrase "once upon a time" signals to readers that they are entering a different world, a world where criteria of realism are irrelevant: "The absurdities in so many of our stories do not worry adults any more than they worry children" (138). However, many authors who reinterpret fairy tales in contemporary retellings consciously depart from this magical thought and confront well-known fairy-tale material with a more realistic setting. They thus set up a literary play with the reader's expectations of magic and realism, making the question of what is real and what is not very relevant. This article seeks to offer an introduction on how contemporary authors, such as Regina Doman, Emma Donoghue, Adele Geras, Tracy Lynn, Roisin Sheerin, and the Flemish writer Tom Naegels, as well as illustrators such as Fiona French and Trina Schart Hyman, interpret and reinterpret magical features in their retellings of the tale of "Snow White." To conclude, I will offer three hypotheses on why the fairy tale is subject to a process of disenchantment in some recent adaptations of the genre. What Is "Realism"? Comparative studies on concepts of realism, such as Luc Herman's (1996) and Dario Villanueva's (1997), have shown that there is no consensus on the meaning of the term: "Realism in literature can mean a great many things" (Herman, preface, n. pag.). Generally "realism" has been used to denote a text that is "true to life." The relativity of this verisimilitude is at least twofold. First, because of differences in cultural and historical background, as well as individual tastes and convictions, authors, readers, and critics may have different views on what reality is. Second, they may disagree on what forms a true representation of this reality. In the discussion of fairy tales and their use of magic and realistic elements, few critics make explicit their definition of what they consider realistic. From their application of the terms, one can discern several implicit definitions of "realism." Some critics, such as Bruno Bettelheim, use it for stylistic descriptions: for the use of details, for instance, or for the occurrence of references to everyday events.1 Others, such as Bernd Wollenweber, use it on a level of content: "fairy tales are not fantastic or unrealistic, on the contrary, they are highly realistic. …

Disenchanting the Fairy Tale: Retellings of "Snow White" between Magic and Realism

This essay examines the representation of adolescent girlhood, sexual violence and agency in Francesca Lia Block’s contemporary fairy tale collection The Rose and The Beast. Focusing specifically on the tale “Wolf,” the author provides a literary analysis of how Block draws on and reworks traditional Western fairy tale variants to reintroduce repressed material about father–daughter incest and sexual violence within the family. This theoretical analysis is augmented by a discussion of how 25 students enrolled in an undergraduate young adult literature course for pre-service English education students read Block’s “Wolf.” The author concludes that despite Block’s revisionist attempts to attend to the rapacious father figure, evidence from student readings reveals that they interpret “Wolf” in ways that fit broader cultural pedagogies of femininity that position the girl as a victim who must learn to defend her body. The author concludes with a discussion of the possibilities and limitations of how gender, sexual violence, and agency can be represented, read, and taught in a contemporary context amidst conflicting cultural scripts of girlhood vulnerability and empowerment.

Girlhood, Sexual Violence, and Agency in Francesca Lia Block’s “Wolf”

The Rose and the Beast: Fairy Tales Retold. By Francesca Lia Block. New York: Harper Collins, 2000. 229 pp. Readers who admire Francesca Lia Block’s series of five stunning contemporary fairy-tale novels, beginning with Weetzie Bat (1989) and which have been subsequently collected under the cumulative title of Dangerous Angels (1998), will probably be disappointed with this most recent collection of short stories. While these nine fairy tales have some of the magic realism and quirky poetic language that have made Block’s slender novels so popular with adolescents and adult readers, they are surprisingly flat and much less inspired or innovative than her previous work. The nine tales that Block chooses to revise are the Grimms’ “Snow White,” “Little Red Riding Hood,” and “Snow White and Rose Red”; Andersen’s “Thumbelina” and “The Snow Queen”; Perrault’s “Cinderella,” “Sleeping Beauty,” and “Bluebeard”; and de Beaumont’s “Beauty and the Beast.” As she has done with her previous novels, Block blends the landscape and culture of contemporary Los Angeles with fairy-tale motifs. One of the chief problems with this collection is that, while these stories are clearly fairy tales retold, they are the most literal reworkings of fairy tales that Block has published to date. The structure and characters of the original tales tend to overpower Block’s attempt to revise them and give them new life and meaning. This sort of thing has been done before and better by Angela Carter in The Bloody Chamber and Other Stories (1979), and by Emma Donoghue in Kissing the Witch: Old Tales in New Skins (1997). What is distinctive about Block’s retellings is that they are extremely stripped down and, one might suggest, bare-bone revisions of the originals. Block has reduced each fairy tale to one-word titles, generally of only four or five letters. These nine words—“Snow,” “Tiny,” “Glass,” “Charm,” “Wolf,” “Rose,” “Bones,” “Beast,” and “Ice”—form amysterious talismanic list that is reproduced on the front of the book. Block must have taken pains with the sequence so that one reads from Snow to Ice, and she provides the mysterious sequence: Tiny Glass Charm. This minimalist approach is replicated in the storytelling as well with barely a hundred words on a page. White space tends to dominate the page design. More bones than text. I suspect these miniature fairy tales reveal the influence ofmodernist poets that Block admires. But while sometimes less is more, on this occasion, less is simply less. Block is consciously creating what might be considered anorexic versions of the fairy tales in that these thin versions are decidedly contemporary and feminist in their tone, and all of her

The Rose and the Beast: Fairy Tales Retold (review)

Francesca Lia Block deftly weaves descriptions of real and imaginary places in her contemporary literary fairy tales set in a dreamy, mythical Los Angeles. Grounded in an urban landscape fueled by the entertainment industry Block's stories celebrate the fantasy of Hollywood, while simultaneously examining the details of contemporary Los Angeles. Her first novel Weetzie Bat , published in 1989, is a slender postmodern fairy tale intended for adolescent readers. In subsequent novels, Block has revisited the same group of characters and locations to produce the five-volume collection Dangerous Angels: The Weetzie Bat Books (1998) which consists of Weetzie Bat and its three sequels Witch Baby (1991), Cherokee Bat and the Goat Guys (1992), Missing Angel Juan (1993); and the one prequel, Baby-Bop (1995). In the addition to her Dangerous Angels series, Block has explored a similar combination of fairy tales and contemporary adolescent culture in novels such as I Was a Teenage Fairy (1998), and the short-story collection The Rose and the Beast: Fairy Tales Retold (2000). While Block is justly celebrated as one of the most innovative and challenging writers of contemporary adolescent novels, the Dangerous Angels series and, Weetzie Bat in particular, remain her most powerfully written literary fairy tales. Whether Weetzie Bat is an accurate representation of the author's hometown or a dreamy fantasy has been debated since the book's publication.

The Rebirth of the Postmodern Flaneur: Notes on the Postmodern Landscape of Francesca Lia Block's Weetzie Bat

Andrew Lang argued that fairy tales were composed of "[a] certain number of incidents" that can then be shaken "into many various combinations of incidents." This also seems to explain the folklorist's composition of The Princess Nobody (1884), his literary fairy tale based on Richard Doyle's previously published illustrations for In Fairyland (1870). Lang manipulated Doyle's illustrations to create a new pattern for his literary fairy tale in a surprisingly postmodern fashion. While Doyle's In Fairyland crystalized the Victorian iconography of fairies, it also anticipates the increasing significance of the visual in the twentieth-century narratives.

"Like the fragments of coloured glass in a kaleidoscope": Andrew Lang Mixes Up Richard Doyle's In Fairyland

Alice in the Oral-Literary Continuum. By Bjorn Sundmark. Lund Studies in English 97. Lund, Sweden: Lund University Press, 1999. This is an interesting, but essentiallymisguided study of LewisCarroll’sAlice books that attempts to reveal the folktale and storytelling elements of Carroll’s literary fairy tales by placing them on what Sundmark terms an oral-literary continuum. For those familiar with Carroll scholarship, this study provides surprisingly little new information. By the Alice books, Sundmark means the four versions of Alice that Carroll produced: Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland (1865), Through the Looking-Glass and What Alice Found There (1872), Alice’s Adventures under Ground—the manuscript Carroll wrote and illustrated specifically for Alice Liddell, presented to her in 1864, and subsequently published in facsimile edition in 1886—andTheNursery “Alice” (1890). Taken as a unit, these four versions of Alice show a fascinating development of the tale that evolved from an oral tale told by Carroll to Alice and her sisters on the famous boating expedition of 4 July 1862 to the handwritten and self-illustrated manuscript to the heavily revised public text illustrated by John Tenniel to itsmoremelancholy and frightening sequel and, finally, to the much simplified version intended for young children that moves toward the picture book format and includes colorized and enlarged illustrations. Since storytelling comes in many forms, Sundmark intends to interpret the Alice books in light of traditional storytelling practices and analyze the many oral features found in these texts. Sundmark properly situates the Alice books as fairy tales, although he overstates the suggestion that the folkloristic aspect of the Alice books has been overlooked. Much scholarship already has been done on Carroll’s use of nursery rhymes and characters based on nursery rhymes. Sundmark is more concerned with the folktale influence on theAlice books; howevermuch of what Sundmark does in this study has already been outlined in Nina Demurova’s article “Toward a Definition of Alice’s Genre: The Folktale and Fairy-Tale Connections” which was published in Lewis Carroll: A Celebration (1982), or is a continuation of points that Demurova has already made. While I am impressed with the effort that went into developing a rather detailed morphological sequence ofWonderland based on Vladimir Propp’s The Morphology of Folk Tale, I do not find it very useful when it comes to a better understanding of Carroll’s text. Carroll consistently refers to Wonderland as a fairy tale in his letters and diary as well as in the introductory poems to the text. He even has Alice, within the body ofWonderland, explicate her situation, “When I used to read fairy tales, I fancied that kind of thing never happened, and now here I am in the middle of one!” Consequently, I do not think this academic exercise provides us anything we did not already know. Nevertheless, some critics have missed this fairly obvious point, as Sundmark observes. The same is true of many critics who insist that Carroll does not want Alice to grow

Jan Susina

Papers

The Rose and the Beast: Fairy Tales Retold (review)

The Rebirth of the Postmodern Flaneur: Notes on the Postmodern Landscape of Francesca Lia Block's Weetzie Bat

"Like the fragments of coloured glass in a kaleidoscope": Andrew Lang Mixes Up Richard Doyle's In Fairyland

Alice in the Oral-Literary Continuum (review)

Alice in Wonderland (review)