Susan Redington Bobby

Bio: Susan Redington Bobby is an academic researcher. The author has contributed to research in topics: Storytelling. The author has an hindex of 1, co-authored 1 publications receiving 3 citations.

Relentless Progress: The Reconfiguration of Children's Literature, Fairy Tales, and Storytelling (review)

Abstract: an ongoing basis. Tatar covers a range of nineteenthand twentieth-century British and American children’s literature in addition to the classic fairy tales of the Brothers Grimm, Charles Perrault, and Hans Christian Andersen. She offers interesting readings of Charlotte’s Web, Peter Pan, Peter and Wendy, The Wizard of Oz, Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, The Secret Garden, and Chronicles of Narnia as well as of more contemporary classics like the Harry Potter series, Norton Juster’s The Phantom Tollbooth, Philip Pullman’s His Dark Materials trilogy, Dr. Seuss, Roald Dahl, Margaret Wise Brown’s Goodnight Moon, and Maurice Sendak’s In the Night Kitchen. Jean de Brunhoff’s (misspelled “Bruhoff” [294]) The Story of Babar is mentioned, but not Antoine de Saint-Exupéry’s The Little Prince. Uncle Tom’s Cabin is also included, but not Joel Chandler Harris’s Uncle Remus. Other “standard” classics are entirely missing: Laura Ingalls Wilder’s Little House series, Beatrix Potter’s tales, Winnie the Pooh, The Hobbit, and Lord of the Rings. Nor is Eoin Colfer’s best-selling Artemis Fowl series mentioned. The fairy-tale-reading heroine of Pan’s Labyrinth, Ofelia, is pictured on the dust jacket’s spine, but Tatar makes no reference to the film. Most surprising is the omission of The Arabian Nights, which has inspired and delighted countless readers through the ages, including Hans Christian Andersen, who recalled Aladdin’s words “here came I as a poor lad” when he spent his first enchanted night at Amalienborg Castle. The only reference we get to Arabian Nights is its “fabled magic carpet” (130). Tatar throws her net wide, and inevitably some of the big fish slip away. Thus, while Enchanted Hunters offers insightful readings of selected books, which Tatar deftly situates in the context of enchantment, the socialization of children, and the accumulation of cultural capital via canonical reads, the book also invites us to continue the debate on social and political aspects of children’s classics and their impact on children’s, and eventually adults’, lived experience. Kirsten Møllegaard University of Hawai’i at Hilo

Composting dragons: recovery and eco-radicalisation of local folk tales in a Gloucestershire landscape

Abstract: This practice-based study reports on a project to reconstruct from Gloucestershire’s surviving folklore 30 stories able both to entertain a live audience and serve an ‘ecobardic’ intention of stimulating ecological consciousness. The article focuses on the legend of ‘The Deerhurst Dragon’, which belongs to a ‘composted’ tradition of dragon-slaying stories. Inspired by local history and field observation of the landscape of the legend, the author reconfigures the tale to expose the conflict likely to arise between large predators and an expanding human population. By attracting empathy to both dragon-slayer and dragon, he hopes to spark questions with implications for real-world conflicts at the same time as enchanting the locality with renewed knowledge of the legend.

"The Habits of History": A Research-Based Play Script

Abstract: In this article, derived from her doctoral dissertation, the author (a teacher educator in drama in Ireland) presents her students’ initial responses to her performance of a one-woman play, “Goldilocks’s Testimony.” The play, written by the author, concerns the marginalisation of women in workplaces. In the play, women’s “real” experiences of workplace marginalisation are transposed to Fairyland. In this article, the author represents her postgraduate student teachers’ responses to her performance in play script format. In this play script, “The Habits of History” (Olsen, 2003), the students’ responses are also transposed to Fairyland.

Twice Upon a Time: Women Writers and the History of the Fairy Tale

Abstract: ELIZABETH WANNING HARRIES, 2003 (2001), Princeton, NJ, Princeton University Press xiv + 216 pp., 0 691 11567 2, pb. $26.95 Why and how do we read the fairy tales we read? How do the particular, cul...