Showing papers in "Marvels and Tales in 2010"

Abstract: Exemplifying the intertextuality of what Stephen Benson has called "postCarter Generation" fairy tales, Emma Donoghue's Kissing the Witch: Old Tales in New Skins (1997) can be seen to "re-engage contemporaneously with an already multilayered polyphony, adding a further critical layer to the plurality" of the genre (Makinen 151). Kissing the Witch consists of twelve revisions of "classic" literary fairy tales from Charles Perrault, the Brothers Grimm, and Hans Christian Andersen, and one final "new" story.1 Each tale recounts the trials of an innocent persecuted heroine figure based upon well-known characters such as Cinderella, Snow White, or the Little Mermaid. The narrator in each case is the character as an older, wiser self. Most of these heroines come to a kind of awakening to their own desires and experience a personal transformation with the help of a (usually older) female character - often the fairy godmother or wicked fairy/stepmother/witch transformed from their pre-texts into caring mentor figures. When she reaches the end of her telling, each narrator turns to this character and asks to hear a tale. On the page following the conclusion of each tale, set off in a framing border, italicized, and centered on the page, are variations of the following lines that follow the narration of the first tale, "The Tale of the Shoe": In the morning 1 asked Who were you Before you walked into my kitchen And she said, Will I tell you my own story? It is a tale of a bird. (Donoghue 9) For each successive tale the time and place of the first line, the meeting of the third, and the final line, which becomes the title of the next story, alter appropriately to make specific links between the narrations that precede and follow it. These interstitial moments work as an internal structural-framing device that provides a formula for the passing on of the storytelling duty, continuity between the tales, and cohesion for the book as a whole. Because of its recursive structure, the proliferation and staged orality of its voices, and its overt representation of multiple types of female desires, Kissing the Witch is a particularly complex text to read from any perspective. It is one such perspective - queer reading - that I will attempt here, on the grounds of an apposite match of text and critical approach. The desires encoded in the stories are as varied as the tellers themselves. They include same-sex sexual desire between women, heterosexual desire of women for men, desires for autonomy and freedom, and desires for individual subjectivity, for belonging, and for knowledge. Kissing the Witch can unreservedly be called a feminist text, but as Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick makes clear in Epistemology of the Closet, feminism and the study of sexuality are not coextensive - that is, "gender and sexuality represent two analytic axes that may productively be imagined as being distinct from one another as, say, gender and class, or class and race" (30). Part of this productive distinction makes intelligible the characterization of Kissing the Witch as feminist text but not necessarily as queer text. While it does represent various women's struggles for autonomy in heteropatriarchal culture, it does not attempt to conflate and then redress sexual and gendered hierarchies by merely presenting one or two universalized lesbian characters in opposition to heteronormative desire. Instead, each tale tells of the different complex and contingent desires of its female protagonists, and it is in the reader's approach to these desires and the book's structure that a queer reading can be produced, albeit far from automatically. In fact, Kissing the Witch frustrates not only hegemonic patriarchal discourses and normative desires, but also the desires of the critic who wishes to describe its structure and themes in a tidy package. This structure is not amenable to diagramming, and all that can be said consistently of the stories-except the last, original tale - is that they reimagine some of the best-known fairy tales; that all of the narrators are women, except when they are birds or horse skulls; and that each of them learns something from the figure to whom she passes on the narration of the next tale. …

Abstract: In an early scene in Guillermo del Toro's Pan's Labyrinth, Carmen, the very pregnant mother of the protagonist, Ofelia, takes a book of fairy stories from Ofelia's hands and says, "I don't understand why you had to bring so many books, Ofelia. Fairy tales, you're a bit too old to be filling your head with such nonsense."1 As soon as the words pass her lips, Carmen feels a sudden need to vomit. And thus an important theme of the film is presented as a warning: rejecting fairy tales will make you barf. While I raise this warning as a joke, the importance of story and storytelling to Pan's Labyrinth is no joking matter. Attention to story is paramount in this film, and not as a panacea for the hardships of "real" life; the relationship between characters and various types of narrative is key to survival, both of the stories themselves and of the characters who tell them. This paper asks how the narrative desires of the characters interact at the level of story ("what" is being told) and how the desires at work in the narrative itself play out at the level of discourse ("how" a story is told - in cinematic texts in terms of miseen-scene and editing). Key to my reading of Pan's Labyrinth is the notion of disobedience: the refusal of characters to submit to the narrative desires of others at their own expense as well as the disobethence of the film itself to satisfy audience desires and conventional generic expectations. In this reading the fairy tale is the vehicle through which the film not only problematizes and resists reductive and regulatory discourses of particular characters within the text but also challenges audiences and critics who may be tempted to produce reductive readings or employ totalizing textual theories. Pan's Labyrinth is an original cinematic fairy tale that makes clear visual and verbal references to oral, literary, and cinematic fairy-tale traditions. In its intertextual references Pan's Labyrinth announces its fealty to the fairy tale in the alignment of its heroine with well-known fairy-tale heroines like Snow White, Lewis Carroll's Alice (Alice in Wonderland 1865), and Dorothy of MGM's The Wizard of Oz (1939). Ofelia's connections to these characters is particularly apparent in her appearance: her black hair, white skin, and red lips; the dress and pinafore her mother gives her; and the red shoes she taps at the end of the film. Intertextual references also contribute to the hybrid nature of this particular text, which employs familiar imagery, plot structures, and character types not only from fairy tales but also from other genres such as the period political drama, horror, and dark fantasy. Thus, Pan's Labyrinth's hybrid nature itself constitutes a form of disobethence to audience expectations of each of these genres by combining genres that are normally distinct. Also notable are the "disobedient" or unconventional choices Guillermo del Toro made as the writer, director, and producer of the film and which he remarks upon in his extradiegetic voice-over commentary on the DVD.2 Disobedience is an important factor in fairy tales. So much so that Vladimir Propp notes "interdiction" and "violation" of the interdiction as functions 2 and 3 in Morphology of the Folktale. Indeed, it is often a specific disobethent act that sets the tale in motion or continues it on its trajectory: Snow White disobeys the dwarves and answers the door to the witch; Dorothy runs away from the farm; Alice leaves her sister to chase the white rabbit. In Pan's Labyrinth disobethence is a primary theme that is coded as positive, and even essential to survival. And, I would like to argue, disobethence does not function only as a theme in Pan's Labyrinth, but it also can be found at the level of discourse, and it is closely related to narrative desires. Narrative Desire Discussions of narrative desire and the dynamics of reading pleasure are most often inflected by psychoanalysis, as shown in Peter Brooks's Reading for the Plot and Teresa de Lauretis's Alice Doesn't: Feminism, Semiotics, and Cinema, both published in 1984. …

Abstract: I take little comfort in the qualifying phrase "not quite" when Jonathan Gottschall says in a 2008 interview about the state of literary and cultural studies, "I'm not quite calling for total disciplinary annihilation and genocide" (Peterson B9, emphasis mine). Now, I'm not sure whether annihilation comes in degrees less than total, but if it does, even a little bit of annihilation and genocide goes a long way - metaphorically or not. Gottschall, who frequently trains his sights on folktale and fairy-tale studies, does not approve of what passes for literary and cultural scholarship. "It's not such a good time to be a literary scholar," he writes in an article published in 2008 in the Ideas section of the Boston Globe ("Measure"). It's not a good time for us, Gottschall asserts, because "over the last decade or so, more and more literary scholars have agreed that the field has become moribund, aimless, and increasingly irrelevant to the concerns not only of the 'outside world,' but also to the world inside the ivory tower" ("Measure"). Perhaps I have spent too many years in the company of the Brothers Grimm, but the fairy-tale allusion embedded in this description demands attention - literary scholarship as a Sleeping Beauty lying moribund and forgotten in her room in the castle's old tower, waiting for the kiss of a prince to bring her back to life. As Gottschall asserts in concluding his Boston Globe manifesto, "If we literary scholars can summon the courage and humility" to walk through the imagined "wall dividing the two cultures of the sciences and the humanities," "we can reawaken a long-dormant spirit of intellectual adventure" ("Measure").1 The fact is that over the past three to four decades, literary scholarship - at least in the case of fairy-tale studies - has been anything but "moribund, aimless, and increasingly irrelevant to the concerns ... of the Outside world'" and the concerns of those of us who occupy the so-called ivory tower. So it is particularly perplexing that Gottschall should turn repeatedly to the folktale and fairy tale in order to offer a model for resurrecting what he considers to be a slumbering discipline. This very conference on "The Fairy Tale after Angela Carter" - which is the immediate occasion for this article2 - is based on the recognition that the last thirty years and more have been a period of extraordinarily fruitful creative and critical engagement with the fairy tale - indeed, that fairy-tale production has been provoked and nourished by fairy-tale studies precisely because scholars from many disciplines have related the genre to social, political, cultural, educational, and other human concerns in what is called, in contrast to the "ivory tower" of academe, the real world. Far from kissing fairy-tale studies awake, this conference recognizes that it is time to step back from the sleeping maiden, who is by now very wide awake, take a deep breath, and examine what all this activity means and where it is leading us. This is not to say that the newer legacy of fairy-tale scholarship ajter Angela Carter has completely overtaken the legacy of fairy-tale scholarship bejore Angela Carter - that the burden of nineteenth-century folktale studies as it took shape in the wake of the Brothers Grimm has been completely lifted. Despite the progress we have made in understanding the fairy tale, some deeply entrenched ideas remain problematic. So in setting out "to assess the state of current critical and creative practice, as well as to pinpoint future directions for writing and research," as the conference Website proposes we do ("Fairy Tale"), it makes sense to think not only about the legacy of Angela Carter and her generation of scholars and creative artists, but also about the older legacy of folklore scholarship. This brings me back, then, to the fairy-tale scholarship of Jonathan Gottschall. A prolific, polemic, and engaging advocate of literary Darwinism who has been featured in articles in the New York Times Magazine (Max) and the Chronicle oj Higher Education (Peterson),3 Gottschall advocates that "Literary studies should become more like the sciences. …

Abstract: Make your once-upon-a-time dreams come true and dine in the one and only Cinderella Castle. Cinderella invites you into the glorious private dining hall of her castle for a storybook meal. Meet characters from Disney's Royal Family at the all-you-care-to-eat Once Upon a Time Breakfast or the customized prix fixe menu offered at the Fairytale Lunch. For the non-character side to this delicious dining experience, be sure to visit Cinderella's Royal Table. -"Cinderella's Royal Table" "Cinderella" continues to be tempting fare. Now we can literally feast with the fairy-tale heroine at Disney's Magic Kingdom, maybe even drinking orange juice from a glass slipper during the Once Upon a Time Breakfast or savoring "oranges and citrons" (Perrault 452) at the Fairytale Lunch. Cinderella's table is certainly "royal." And, of course, we can consume the variety of popular culture adaptations of her story that provides lucrative royalties to the Walt Disney Corporation, which also satiates our desire for products connected to faene: a Cinderella camera and scrapbook set, a Cinderella hair-styling play set, a Cinderella thermal henley, or a Cinderella snowglobe, just to mention a small selection. Cinderella has also been gracing the silver screen for many years, from the classic Cinderella (Disney 1950), the musical Cinderella (Rogers and Hammerstein 1964), to the live-action updated A Cinderella Story (2004). Disney, as one might expect, features the heroine prominently in its Disney Princess Series, most notably in Cinderella U: Dreams Come True and Cinderella III: A Twist in Time. Recently, Cinderella has spread her magic to the popular movie Enchanted (2007). Entertainment Weekly says of Princess Giselle, the movie's heroine, that "the resourceful heroine is soul sister to Cinderella, Sleeping Beauty, and Snow White" (Schwarzbaum). Manohla Dargis, writing in a New York Times review of Enchanted, which received a New York Times Critics' Pick, admits that fairy-tale "movies like to promise girls and women a happily ever after, but it's unusual that one delivers an ending that makes you feel unsullied and uncompromised, that doesn't make you want to reach for your Simone de Beauvoir or a Taser" ("Someday"). The reference to Simone de Beauvoir is significant, for fairy tales have been connected with women's issues, it seems, since they were first written down and published. "One is not born, but rather becomes, a woman," writes Simone de Beauvoir in The Second Sex (267). Cinderella's popularity could have led Beauvoir to modify her claim: "One is not born, but rather becomes, a princess." Maria Tatar suggests that Cinderella's character is so elastic that she "has been reinvented by so many different cultures that it is hardly surprising to find that she is sometimes cruel and vindictive, at other times compassionate and kind" and agrees, in spirit, with Jane Yolen's assessment that "the shrewd, resourceful heroine of folktales from earlier centuries has been supplanted by a 'passive princess' waiting for Prince Charming to rescue her" (Tatar 102). Cinderella's elasticity, however, has also led to more contemporary reinventions that rehabilitate her - that is, some have reinterpreted Cinderella as a strong, independent woman. Three recent and illustrative recastings of Cinderella include Barbara Walker's version in Feminist Fairy Tales (1996), Emma Donoghue's in Kissing the Witch (1997), and Francesca Lia Block's in The Rose and the Beast (2000). These versions attempt to counteract the image of Cinderella as a beautiful but passive, docile young woman that is often perpetuated in popular culture and, ironically, in the classic versions of the fairy tale that have been handed down through the ages, primarily those by Charles Perrault and the Brothers Grimm. Walker, Donoghue, and Block suggest that Cinderella was not born a passive woman, but rather became one. Indeed, she has been drawn that way throughout the ages and seems in need of gender refashioning. …

Abstract: [Y]ou were destined to marry a savage wild beast. - Apuleius In many a folktale and fairy tale, women encounter monstrous creatures. Hairy wolves and bears, slimy snakes and frogs, or even ogres partake of the heroines' confrontations with the - male - Other. Following Bruno Bettelheim, psychoanalytical analyses generally posit that beasts function as veiled symbols representing sexuality that children must initially experience as disgusting before they reach maturity and discover its beauty In contrast to such views, Jack Zipes argues that children's instinctual drives are "conditioned and largely determined through interaction and interplay with the social environment" (Fairy Tales 32-33). As a consequence, fairy tales are inevitably shaped by the historical period in which they are published and must be viewed through a sociopolitical lens. Indeed, many historians and literary critics envisage fairy tales as documents marked by social and economic conditions. As Marina Warner argues, fairy tales are permeated with "evidence of conditions from past social and economic arrangements" (xix). For Betsy Hearne, each new version reflects, in addition, "new variations of culture and creativity" (I).1 Zipes's exploration of the changes made to the tales convincingly brings to light how social pressures and norms, which may vary with time, weigh on fairy tales. His analysis of Perrault's, the Brothers Grimm's, or Hans Christian Andersen's literary fairy tales underlines how the revisions of oral folktales through the seventeenth, eighteenth, and nineteenth centuries are fueled by social and cultural references. Thus, hints at bourgeois mores and manners transfigure the discourse of the folktales in order to suit and to strengthen the rising power of the bourgeoisie. Moreover, such revised tales impose standards for sexual and social conduct that hinge on "inhibiting forms of socialization" (Zipes, Fairy Tales 33). In Zipes's view, throughout the centuries, competition and wealth become keywords, and patriarchal interests increasingly orchestrate the tales, stressing male domination and feminine subjection. Zipes's interpretation of fairy tales is invaluable to any reader or scholar examining Victorian fairy tales. Unlike in France or Germany - and with the possible exceptions of tales by Charles Perrault and Marie-Catherine d'Aulnoy - fairy tales were not generally approved and accepted in England before the beginning of the nineteenth century, especially for children.2 Despite the fact that the classical fairy tales by Perrault had been translated into English in 1729, it was not before the end of the eighteenth century and the beginning of the nineteenth century that chapbook versions of Perrault's tales appeared in a format designed to appeal to children. In 1823 and 1826, selections from the Brothers Grimm's fairy tales were translated into English by Edgar Taylor and illustrated by George Cruikshank. Andersen's Wonderful Stories for Children, published in England in 1846 and translated by Mary Howitt, because of their overt Christian principles and their suffering (and often mutilated) characters, paved the way for a wider acceptance of fairy tales as suitable literature for children (see Zipes, Victorian xvii-xviii). Interestingly, just as fairy tales were making their way into the nursery, they very quickly became a means to question social, political, and cultural issues. Indeed, though mid-Victorian fairy tales undoubtedly represented middle-class settings, protagonists, and codes of conduct, some of them also debunked the bourgeois ideology. Not all literary fairy tales were subversive, however, and many of them seemed to both affirm and denounce the fairy tale's patriarchal discourse, especially when written - or rewritten - by women. In fact, in order to challenge traditional roles, women had to work within cultural paradigms. As shall be seen, the significant aspect of most of them is the transformation and adaptation of the classical fairy tales to the social and cultural environment of mid- Victorian England. …

Abstract: In me she has drowned a young girl, and in me an old woman Rises toward her day after day like a terrible fish. - Sylvia Plath, "Mirror" In the conclusion of the 2007 film Enchanted, a gently parodie and self-referential retake of Disney animated fairy tales, Giselle must make a choice between contemporary Manhattan and the animated fairy-tale world of Andalasia. Although she chooses Manhattan, the film makes clear that the influence of the Disney fairy tale has pervaded the contemporary world.1 The film attempts to outline a clear distinction between the two until Giselle's influence begins to be felt. In an early scene immediately before their meeting with Giselle, Robert (solicitor and love interest) informs his six-year-old daughter, Morgan, of his decision to propose to his current girlfriend, Nancy. In order to soften the blow of the announcement, Robert gives Morgan a present of a book titled Important Women of Our Time, which Morgan does not appear to be overly impressed with - she had wanted a book of fairy tales. Robert states that Nancy, his prospective fiancee, is a lot like the women in the book. However, it is a woman from a different type of narrative that instead prevails in the life of Robert and Morgan: Giselle, the fairy-tale heroine. As domestic ultra-innocent child- woman (several references are made to her ignorance of sex), Giselle is positioned as the ideal wife and mother for this family. Although we later see Giselle reading Important Women in a scene that could suggest the book's influence on her later heroic action in dispatching the evil Queen Narissa, the tension between the "important women" and the world of Disney fairy tale is ultimately resolved in favor of the latter. Career-woman Nancy and the "important women" of the book are, in the overall logic of the film, deemed unimportant. Nancy abandons her job and Manhattan for the animated fairy-tale world to become Prince Edward's bride. The evil Queen Narissa is defeated. The world of the Disney fairy tale wins out against cynicism, "important women," and the wicked queen. It is the tension between older "important women" and the youthful heroine that I want to explore in this article in relation to two films, The Brothers Gnmm (2005) and Stardust (2007), which, like Enchanted, initially appear to challenge fairy-tale conventions but ultimately revolve around conflict between female representatives of age and youth. In Stardust and The Brothers Gnmm, these confrontations are staged explicitly in terms of the visual and its emphasis on female beauty. Jack Zipes contends in Why Fairy Tales Stick that "we use the classical fairy tales in mutated forms through new technologies to discuss and debate urgent issues that concern our social lives and the very survival of the human species" (xiii). If these films suggest anything about contemporary concerns, they point to an abiding anxiety in relation to regulating the spectacle of the aging female body. The relationship between telling fairy tales and inculcating obethent behavior, particularly gendered behavior, through inciting fear has a long history. Critics such as Zipes and Marina Warner have explored the role of fairy tales as socializing narratives that inculcate adherence to contemporaneous gender roles.2 However, it is also true that women writers such as Angela Carter, Margaret Atwood, and A. S. Byatt, among others, have used the fairy-tale genre to engage with and uproot patriarchal representations of femininity and sexuality. The fairy tale thus offers a potent space in which to negotiate questions of gender and gendered representations.3 It is this tension between the conservative/patriarchal impulses of the fairy tale and the subversive potentials that the genre can also offer that this article examines, with specific focus on two recent films. Stardust and The Brothers Gnmm both play with the fairy-tale genre and gender and exhibit various similarities in their themes, their reuse of particular fairy-tale tropes, and their positioning of female protagonists. …

Abstract: Andrew Lang's Fairy Books (1889–1910) not only contain implicit and explicit references to colonialism but also exhibit qualities similar to other nineteenth-century collections. Lang's collection offers opportunities to engage with the comparative method of folklore, addresses theories of cultural evolution, and collects narratives from various countries and cultures, thereby allowing the narratives to be possessed and displayed. Recognizing the colonizing presence implicit in the process of editing international narratives into a collection designed for a British readership, this article demonstrates that individual stories such as "The Glass Axe" acquire further signification when analyzed, first, alongside another narrative in the collection, "The Magic Mirror," and, second, when examined within the context of the Fairy Book collection as a whole.

Abstract: The wicked stepmother is a staple of the popular fairy-tale tradition and arguably its most famous villain. While she wasn't always wicked or always a stepmother in folklore tradition, the wicked stepmother can be found in a variety of well-known Western fairy tales. The Brothers Grimm feature some of the best-known stepmothers, such as those in "Cinderella" (ATU 510A), "Snow White" (ATU 709), and "Hansel and Gretel" (ATU 327A) as well as lesserknown stepmothers, such as those in "The Six Swans" (ATU 450) and "The Juniper Tree" (ATU 720), all of whom are wicked. Walt Disney took the Grimms' wicked stepmother and gave her an unforgettable face in his 1937 film, Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs. Snow White's stepmother stands out for her terrifying image as the wicked queen. Since then, the wicked stepmother has become a stock figure, a fairy-tale type that invokes a vivid image at the mention of her role - so much so that stepmothers in general have had to fight against their fairy-tale reflections. A quick Internet search for the term "wicked stepmother" will produce hundreds of websites dedicated to the plight of stepmothers fighting against the "wicked" moniker they have inherited from fairy tales. Robert Coover's 2004 novel, Stepmother, takes on the wicked stepmother figure of fairy-tale tradition and offers a more complex depiction of the character. The plot of Coover's novel is quite simple; the novel, however, is far from simple. Stepmother, the title character and the novel's protagonist, is trying to save her daughter's life. Her unnamed daughter has been found guilty of an unnamed crime against the court of Reaper's Woods and is to be executed. Stepmother breaks her daughter out of prison, and the two of them flee to the woods. Stepmother hides her daughter and, once the daughter is recaptured, tries various schemes to prevent, or at least to delay, the planned execution. She tries appealing to the Reaper, her arch enemy and the authority in the woods, with magic, sex, and reason, but she fails. Her daughter is executed, and Stepmother seeks vengeance. The execution of her daughter and Stepmother's subsequent revenge is not a new plot to Stepmother, as she repeats it over and again with each of her daughters, the many heroines of fairy-tale tradition: How many I've seen go this way, daughters, stepdaughters, whatever - some just turn up at my door, I'm never quite sure whose they are or where they come from - but I know where they go: to be drowned, hung, stoned, beheaded, burned at the stake, impaled, torn apart, shot, put to the sword, boiled in oil, dragged down the street in barrels studded on the inside with nails or nailed into barrels with holes drilled in them and rolled into the river. Their going always sickens me and the deep self-righteous laughter of their executioners causes the bile to rise, and for a time thereafter I unleash a storm of hell, or at least what's in my meager power to raise, and so do my beautiful wild daughters, it's a kind of violent mourning, and so they come down on us again and more daughters are caught up in what the Reaper calls the noble toils of justice and thus we keep the cycle going, rolling along through this timeless time like those tumbling nail-studded barrels. (1-2) Stepmother explains that there is nothing new in what we are about to read; she has experienced it all before and will experience it all again. But she still has to try to save her daughter, and as readers we are left with the impression that she will keep trying with each new daughter's appearance. The impetus of the novel is summed up in its second sentence, narrated by Stepmother: "my poor desperate daughter, her head is locked on one thing and one thing only: how to escape her inescapable fate" (1). Throughout the novel, Stepmother and other characters struggle against their predetermined fairy-tale functions. Despite recognizing the "inescapability" of their fates, they still try to change the cycle of events they know will unfold by manipulating fairy-tale patterns to their advantage. …

Abstract: The language surrounding adaptations from print texts to film reflects a valuing of print for its originary authority. Despite this privileging of print textuality, several recent fairytale films blend fairy-tale motifs and references to popular film and culture in something more akin to a "hypertextual" aesthetic. This article suggests that Guillermo del Toro's Pan's Labyrinth [El laberinto del fauno] (2006) integrates motifs from multiple sources in a way that benefits from elements of both print textuality and hypertextuality, a combination that mediates fairy-tale content to ward explicitly sociopolitical critique.

Abstract: Except, 1 assure you, 1 did not await the kiss of a magic prince, sir! With my two eyes, 1 nightly saw how such a kiss would seal me up in my appearance forever! - Fewers in Angela Carter's Nights at the Circus When we think of Sleeping Beauty, what immediately comes to mind is the magical kiss given by the Prince Charming to the eponymous heroine, often filtered through Walt Disney's animated movie of 1959. A central icon of the Disney fairy-tale industry, the pink, gold, and light blue Sleeping Beauty Castle used to feature a Barbie-doll reproduction of the scene as the highlight of Disneyland's walk-through attraction before being replaced by the original Eyvind Earle artwork. The emblematic scene was also represented in prominent Disney advertising campaigns on the occasion of the fiftieth anniversary of the film. In 2009 the kiss was reenacted by Hollywood movie stars Zac Efron and girlfriend Vanessa Hudgens (themselves Disney Channel products), photographed in a glamorous mise-en-scene by Annie Leibowitz.1 To counterpoint Efron and Hudgens's American romance, newlywed model Mariya Yamada and husband/actor Toru Kusano posed in front of the original poster to promote the release of Disney's Sleeping Beauty on Blu-ray and DVD. Both pictures testify to the ongoing appeal and global dimension of one of the most powerful myths exploiting the confusion between life and fiction.2 No wonder, then, that Charles Perrault's literary version of "La Belle au bois dormant" ("The Sleeping Beauty in the Wood") has been rejected by second-wave feminist critics on the grounds of its alleged reinforcement of patriarchal structures and values.3 In 1973 Marcia Lieberman condemned fairy tales for serving "to acculturate women to traditional social roles" (187) by shaping their behavior and aspirations. Taking Cinderella and Sleeping Beauty as paradigmatic examples, she observes that Andrew Lang's "Blue Fairy Book is filled with weddings, but it shows little of married life" (198), as most of the tales "literally end with the wedding" (199). A few years later, Karen Ro we pursued the same argument as she indicted fairy tales for romanticizing marriage to the point of undermining the sociocultural changes promoted by the feminist movement.4 And yet, surprising though it may be, there is no kiss between the Prince and the Princess in Perrault's conte, neither is there one in the English translation published in Lang's Blue Fairy Book. Upon the arrival of the Prince in the bedchamber, it is simply said that the Princess wakes up now that the hundred years have elapsed: "Alors comme la fin de l'enchantement etait venue, la Princesse s'eveilla" (136) ("And now, as the enchantment was at an end, the Princess awaked" [Blue Fairy Book 59]). What is more, far from concluding the tale, the marriage takes place roughly midway through the narrative, and rather than marital bliss, it leads to the horrific persecution of the bride and her two children by an ogress mother-in-law while the new King is away battling with his neighbor. Surely this must have struck Angela Carter when in 1976 she read Perrault's Histoires ou contes du temps passe, avec des Moralites (1697) (Stones or Tales of Past Times, with Morals) in French and went on to translate them into modern English. The disparity between popular perceptions of the story and the reality of Perrault's text must have alerted Carter to the fact that the fairy tale was a more complex document than most critics of the story were suggesting. For many feminists the story was representative of a genre inherently inimical to women. The lack of a romantic kiss in the source text, however, and the fact that the eventual marriage of Sleeping Beauty to the Prince is not without its trials seem to have suggested to Carter that this narrative was not simply an endorsement of saccharine patriarchal romance. In an article titled "The Better to Eat You With," she relates her experience as follows: The notion of the fairy-tale as a vehicle for moral instruction is not a fashionable one. …

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

Abstract: Introduction In discussions of fairy-tale retellings, the concept of intertextuality is often introduced to explain the relationship between a retelling and the traditional fairy tale(s) to which it refers.1 Although the notion of intertextuality was developed by scholars such as Julia Kristeva, Roland Barthes, and Gerard Genette as a far more expansive network of verbal and even nonverbal texts, it is conventionally employed in literary studies to analyze the relationships and dynamics between fictional texts only. If we adopt a broader concept of intertextuality, one that considers not only fictional but also nonfictional pre-texts, a whole new intertextual dimension becomes accessible. For fairy-tale studies, such an approach offers valuable possibilities, especially when it comes to the interaction between fairy tales and the critical and theoretical discourses that have the fairy tale as their subject. Various thematic overlaps and mutual concerns can be perceived between fairy-tale retellings and feminist, psychoanalytic, and Marxist criticism so that fairy-tale criticism appears as a relevant intertext for the retellings, and vice versa.2 In this essay 1 will explore the intertextual dialogue between a selection of fairy-tale retellings from Dutch, German, and English writers and the sociohistorical study of the Grimm brothers' fairy tales. 1 will demonstrate how certain retellings have helped to undermine the Grimms' authority as truthful and reliable folktale collectors, moving on to analyze in more detail retellings that seek an alliance with criticism on the oral tradition underpinning the Grimm collection. In Search of the Truth As the best-known collection of fairy tales worldwide, Jacob and Wilhelm Grimms' Kinder- und Hausmarchen (Children's and Household Tales) has been a popular topic of research. In the course of the twentieth century the editorial process of the Brothers Grimm came under discussion at various times and in various contexts. At the beginning of the twentieth century the first academic publications had already appeared on the editions of Die Kinder- und Hausmarchen, and the question of editorial changes remained on the agenda throughout the century3 In 1975 Heinz Rolleke sparked new interest in the collection's genesis when he published Die alteste Marchensammlung der Bruder Gnmm, an annotated edition of the Olenberg manuscript from 1810, printed next to the tales as they appeared in the first published edition from 1812. This manuscript contains a handful of earlier versions of the Grimm tales as the Grimms had assembled them for their contemporary Clemens Brentano. The manuscript and subsequent published editions of the tales were the topic of further research by scholars such as Siegfried Neumann, Eric Hulsens, John Ellis, Ruth B. Bottigheimer, Klaus Doderer, Wilhelm Solms, Jack Zipes, and Maria Tatar. Writing in 1983, Jack Zipes states that "[u]ntil the 1970s it was generally assumed that the Brothers Grimm collected their oral folktales mainly from peasants and day laborers and that they merely altered and refined the tales while remaining true to their perspective and meaning. Both assumptions proved to be false" (Subversion 61). A substantial number of articles and books have addressed the issue of whether the Brothers Grimm "merely refined" the oral versions they had collected or whether they (un)consciously manipulated them in favor of their own ideology and literary taste. Although Zipes claims that the Grimms did change the meaning of the oral folktales, he stresses that their "intentions were honorable" (61) and that "there is no evidence to indicate that the Grimms consciously sought to dupe German readers and feed them lies about the German past" (Brothers Gnmm 110). He refers here to the impression that the Brothers Grimm created of their tales being German stories when several of the best-known tales in their collection have older variants from Italy and France. …

Abstract: Les Mille et une nuits: Entre Orient et Occident. By Jean-Paul Sermain. Paris: Desjonqueres, 2009. 201 pp. In many respects Jean-Paul Sermain's Les Mille et une nuits: Entre Orient et Occident reads more like an essay than a scholarly book, at least as scholars in the American tradition might expect a book to be structured and written. Sermain focuses on the poetic value of the Arabian Nights, and throughout he looks at the ways Antoine Galland rewrites the Nights to create a hybrid OrientalOccidental text. However, the book's meanderings do not necessarily follow a clear development and at times read like ruminations. For example, chapter 4 revolves around Galland and his "putting the Arabian Nights into French" and all that this implies, arguments touched on earlier in the book, which creates some unnecessary repetition. This chapter would have been better situated at die beginning of the book, setting up the context for the other chapters about the formal and moral structures of the Nights, as well as what the Nights say about French and Arab cultures. I also would have liked to have seen more solid documentation and depth to statements regarding, for instance, the contribution of Antoine Galland's translation to the cultivation of "scholarly curiosity about the Orient and more specifically about the Nights" (14, all quotations are my translation). This remark leads one to wonder what was happening at the level of official institutions of Orientalism and the organization of knowledge about the Orient before and after the publication of the Nights. Finally, Sermain insists on the nonideological quality of the text, which his own readings at times appear to contradict and which ignores the complex ideological tensions inherent in the creation of such a hybrid text. Sermain opens by comparing Galland to the porter of "The Story of the Porter and the Three Dervishes." As "porter" of oriental tales, Galland seeks to share Arab morality and civilization with a Western public. For Galland's readers, these tales are simultaneously strange and familiar (Sermain mentions at one point the uncanny), because despite the strangeness of oriental culture expressed through the tales, they nevertheless articulate a political spirit, a sense of humanity, and a taste for magnificence with which French readers could identify. At the same time, Galland renders the tales familiar to French readers by grafting elements of French language, culture, and literature onto his version of the Nights. In the same way that Sermain tries to create a parallel between Galland and the porter, he also establishes a parallel between the quartered body of Cassim, Ali Baba's brother, that is sewed back together, and the texts of the Nights that Galland unites into a coherent, overarching narrative. Sermain notes some of the changes Galland made to the source story related to him by the Syrian storyteller Hanna, including Ali Baba's name (Galland transcribed the name of Hanna's hero as "Hogia Baba") and the title (originally "The Ruses of Morgiane"). Sermain associates the opening of the cave door and the magnificent treasures it hides to Western fantasies of the East. Sermain reads the tale in terms of the concealment of crime (as essential elements of the narrative) and the revelation of crime, which is the story itself. He views the tale as "the articulation between a struggle of power and ability . …

Abstract: Angela Carter's "The Company of Wolves" became the subject of a cinematic retelling a mere five years after the first edition of The Bloody Chamber (1979) was published in Britain Directed by Neil Jordan from a screenplay he wrote in collaboration with Carter, the film differs considerably from the original short story, the subsequent radio play, and, for that matter, the screenplay itself Set in a contemporary "middle-class England complete with the Volvoowning nuclear family of the Big House," Jordan's film focuses on Rosaleen, die youngest and most troublesome member of the family (Rocke tt 37) Remaining within the confines of her bedroom and refusing to converse with her parents and older sister, the girl falls asleep and dreams her way into a fairy-tale world where she assumes the persona of Little Red Riding Hood As a thoroughly defamiliarized rendition of Carter's tale, since its release in 1984 The Company of Wolves has had a mixed and often hostile critical reception Armed with a feminist and/or Freudian set of critical tools with which to tackle their subject, many of Jordan's critics approach the film with a firm set of expectations based on their reading of Carter's story Several express their disappointment at the director's failure to realize his cowriter's feminist agenda Emer and Kevin Rockett, for instance, take issue with the fact that, unlike Carter's heroine, Rosaleen does not laugh in the face of her antagonist The problem with the film as a feminist text, they argue, is that "no such act of resistance or subversion happens Instead, Rosaleen acquiesces when she comes face to face with the handsome werewolf and he demands his kiss" (19) Similarly, Maggie Anwell concludes that "the reluctance to allow a positive image of the girl's sexuality in such a violent film is what is most fundamentally at variance with the impact and meaning of the story" (85) Although both of these opinions are valid, it should be noted that they are only valid if we assume that Jordan intended to reproduce faithfully the impact and meaning of Carter's tale What his critics fail to consider, in other words, is the possibility that the director may be pursuing a political agenda of his own Although Carter and Jordan cowrote the original screenplay, their collaboration appears to have been somewhat one-sided Contrary to the director's assertion that the text was largely the product of his cowriter's imagination (Dwyer), in an interview with John Haffenden, Carter made clear the fact that "there didn't seem to be any point in writing things he didn't want to film" (85) As she states: "[I]t's not my movie, after all, it's filtered through another sensibility which has a good deal in common with mine but is quite different in many respects For one thing, Neil Jordan was brought up in Catholic Ireland" (Haffenden 84) Despite distancing herself from authorship of the film, Carter nevertheless objected to the charge that it lacked a subversive message (Neale 106) In an interview that appeared in Marxism Today shortly after the film's release, she had the following to say: "I would hotly deny that the movie was a piece of escapism The Thatcherite censorship certainly found it subtly offensive They couldn't put their finger on it, but they knew something was wrong" (Carter, "Company" 22) Arguably, what is "wrong" with The Company of Wolves is the perplexing Irish nationalist subtext that pulses beneath its skin: a subtext that is born of Jordan's Irish Catholic sensibility and is directly related to modern Irish history and, more pertinently, to the so-called Troubles in Northern Ireland The key to unlocking the door to this particular bloody chamber lies in a series of important departures in the film from Carter's original short story It is on these several deviations that this article will focus its attention - specifically, Jordan's use of the extended dream sequence, his incorporation of the literary trope of the big house, and, in the first instance, his representation of the heroine, Rosaleen …

Abstract: This article considers the intertextual use of “Jack and the Beanstalk” and “Whittington and His Cat” in Samuel Selvon’s 1958 novel, Turn Again Tiger. These fictions fulfill a complex function in Selvon’s work, operating as narratives that represent the legacy of slavery and colonization and as fictions that can play an affirmative role in a decolonized postcolonial Caribbean imaginary. Selvon’s work helps us come to a sophisticated understanding of the functioning of English traditions in postcolonial contexts—an understanding that resists both the banal postmodernist assumption that such fictions can simply be reabsorbed and reutilized regardless of their history and the radical Afrocentrist argument that European narratives can have no constructive part to play in the establishment of an independent postcolonial Caribbean identity.

Abstract: On the Origin of Stories: Evolution, Cognition, and Fiction. By Brian Boyd. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2009. iii + 540 pp. One would think there might be some mention of folktales, myths, legends, and other short traditional narratives in a book dedicated to explaining how and why stories originated. One would think literary fairy tales might receive a few words as well. But one had better shed such expectations before reading On the Orig^n of Stones. Brian Boyd's study, based on Darwinist theory, provides few historical clues to explain how types of tales originated and developed. Instead, he is more interested in writing a bible for the propagation of evolutionary psychological principles to grasp our natural inclination for narrative. Though he proclaims to be scientific and tolerant of other approaches to art and literature, a promoter of E. O. Wilson's consilience theory, he denounces current theoretical approaches to culture and literature and spins hypothetical and often unfounded notions about the origins and appeal of stories in the name of "evocriticism," his coined term for evolutionary criticism, which he wants to validate in this book. Moreover, his misinformed tirades against "Theory" - his amorphous term for what he considers the pestilent abstruse thought (lumping together Jacques Derrida, Michel Foucault, Roland Barthes, and other critical theorists) that has infected the academy - run through his book, making it difficult for anyone who might be sympathetic to evolutionary psychology and anthropology to appreciate some of his unusual "materialist" insights that can help us understand why stories are so invaluable in human evolution and why they command our attention. Though disturbed by many of the inadequacies and contradictions of Boyd's book, I would like to sort out some of his more valid ideas about evolutionary psychology and Darwinism that could be helpful and applicable in the study of folk and fairy tales. (Indeed, it is important not to throw out the baby with the bathwater.) But before I do this, I want to summarize the main arguments of Boyd's book so that there is some context for understanding how his project - to rescue the agency of the storyteller/author as a member of the evolving human species, and thus to rescue the humanities from itself - might bear some fruit. Boyd divides On the Origin of Stones into two books with five parts. The first book consists of three parts that deal with evolution in relation to nature, art, and fiction. The second book has two parts in which Boyd applies his theoretical principles to interpret Homer's The Iliad and The Odyssey and Dr. Seuss's Horton Hears a Who! From the outset, he states that he has two main aims: "first, to offer an account of fiction (and of art in general) that takes our widest context for explaining life, evolution; and to offer a way beyond the error of thought and practice in much modern academic literary study, which over the last few decades has often stifled - and has even sought to stifle - the pleasure, the life, and the art of literature" (11). These are huge claims and grave accusations, and it takes a great deal of hubris and/or ingenuousness to make them. Boyd's major thesis in the first book is that since humans all share the same genetic wiring and evolved brain formation that enable them to adapt effectively to their environments, they have developed universal concerns manifested in all forms of art. Adaptation is necessary for reproduction and survival, and for Boyd, as humans adapted to the environment and the brain grew and became more complex, it developed neural systems and modules that enabled it to process information faster and with less effort. The honing of the mind made humans more disposed to selecting fitter partners, cooperating with one another more effectively, forming norms and regulations that furthered fitness and survival, and creating patterns and designs that provided knowledge and security. …

Abstract: "Through all the twists and turns, metamorphoses and transmogrifications The Arabian Nights has undergone," Marina Warner points out, "the central theme remains and remains known to every hearer and every reader" (Signs and Wonders 368). She speaks of the frame narrative of The Arabian Nights (henceforth Nights): Shahrazad telling stories to Sultan Shahryar every night till dawn, to save her life. In her novel When Dreams Travel (1999), the contemporary Indian writer Githa Hariharan has one of her characters exclaim in response to a similarly well-traversed narrative situation, "Is there no way out of this old story?" (231). The voice belongs to the slave girl Dilshad, who is lost, as the story she tells of herself goes, in the forest - another familiar, fairy-tale scenario. Yet as soon as she says these words, she sees the way out of the forest. It is her search for adventure and the desire for "unmapped territory" that have led her here (226). What instigates this question that magically delivers her from the forest is her realization that she is living a script. In the forest she has met, successively, two men - the first deceives her into marrying him with the promise that he will help her find her way, and the second, a strange, graceful, deer-man, is, in turn, seduced by her. Her story of herself has unwittingly followed two contrasting but related formulas - in her words: "the king seizes a virgin girl, the courtesan seduces a virgin boy" (231). It is this persistent rigidity of preexisting scripts - of fairy tales, of myths, of fictions about women - that is explored in Hariharan's retelling of The Arabian Nights. Old stories continue to slip into her storytellers' tales and remain the worlds that their characters are forced to inhabit. It is, however, precisely the text's awareness of, and even complicity with, such scenarios that becomes subversive in the text. The strongest claim on the characters' dreams and fictions is posited by the frame architecture of the Nights, which serves as the structuring principle of When Dreams Travel. The novel offers a chronologically complicated frame that circles from the time of the first night, through the day after the thousand-and-first night, to years after that, and back again. This "temporal eclecticism," to borrow Stephen Benson's term ("Introduction" 4), is achieved through the use of mirrors and dreams, whether reminiscent, prophetic, or speculative, as instruments of time travel. As Stephanie Jones points out, the novel belongs to a genealogy of contemporary reworkings of the Nights diat "embolden" Dinarzad, or Dunyazad, Shahrazad's sister.1 In these texts she is given body, voice, and agency, thus being released from her role of "audience, prompter, chorus, and heckler" (130), forever at the foot of the Sultan's bed, urging Shahrazad, "Sister, if you are not sleepy tell us one of your lovely little tales to while away the night" (Nights 39). The dynamics of Hariharan's novel denies the very possibility of Dinarzad's position - "the empty place," somehow both within and outside the text, which Western readers of the Nights found convenient to occupy and from which they could both "listen in" to Shahrazad's stories and observe an Eastern despotism "from the sidelines" (Ballister 90-91). In Hariharan's novel we encounter a middle-aged Dunyazad, who has married Shahryar's brother, Shahzaman (as happens in longer versions of the Nights), and has lived with him in Samarkand for years but is now a widow. We see her arriving at the palace of Shahryar, who has recently become a widower himself, to discover the reasons for Shahrzad's unexpected death. There, in the fictional city of Shahabad, she assists the Sultan's son, Prince Umar, in taking over the throne to institute what is described as "a new order of things" (98), but which is only, as Dunyazad comments, another "regime" with "a tyrannical god at the head of the palace" (103). She is aided by the slave girl Dilshad, who has served Shahrzad and Shahryar, witnessed Shahrzad's death, and has intimate knowledge of the palace's structure and secrets. …

Abstract: Archaeology of Intangible Heritage By Francisco Vaz da Silva International Folkloristics, Vol 4 New York: Peter Lang, 2008 191 pp In this densely argued book, Francisco Vaz da Silva invites us to uncover die root meanings of the metaphors commonly used in our cultures and, in so doing, recover the lost connections to our "intangible heritage" Although the book's title appears to be paradoxical, since archaeology should deal with "tangible" artifacts, the author competently applies archaeological methodology to investigate the "intangible," conceptual dimension of familiar metaphors and imagery that we regularly use without acknowledging their cosmic connotations In so doing, Vaz da Silva asks questions that might sound relatively childlike, such as "why should horns and cuckoos be the attributes of the unhappy husband?" (7) Yet his answers to such questions are sophisticatedly formed through careful analysis and examination of key literary works, documents, popular religious texts, and ritual practices from the classical period to contemporary folk beliefs, in Europe as well as in Melanesia This highly impressive assortment of primary sources, along with Vaz da Suva's archaeological approach to the concepts, helps restore back from oblivion the mythical meanings of otherwise apparently trivial metaphors This book is divided into three parts The first part, "Physiology," begins by investigating the notion of the transmissible sexual horns and thereby introduces the reader to the world of esoteric folklores and folk practices Vaz da Silva focuses in particular on the human body, sexuality, and gender relations in all their grotesque details The chapters abound with tales of bodily fluids and secretions, drawn widely from sources across time and space Through such an archaeological project, the reader is brought face to face with a folk theory of anatomy and the gender hierarchy inherent in such a theory Vaz da Silva convincingly takes the reader on a trip from specific cultural beliefs and practices to a universal folk frame of reference that struggles to explain human existence and connect various observable phenomena under a single, coherent worldview Semen, milk, and menstruation become linked to the wider world of seasons, plants, and animals This interconnected worldview is precisely what we have lost as metaphors seep into general usage and are reduced to words without meaning The second part, aptly named "Metaphysics," moves on from the physicality of the first part to the realm beyond the physical Vaz da Silva takes off from the folk worldview at the end of part one to explore female dominance of the cycle of life and men's struggles to define their existence and superiority within this cycle The cycle of life then becomes another step in Vaz da Suva's argument to propose that the key characteristic of folk worldview is the cyclical cosmos The folkloric world that Vaz da Silva describes has no beginning and end …

Abstract: "Other children have a nanna," says Daisy, "Why not me?" She turns her face up to her mother, who is combing her hair after washing it. It is curly and thick and tangles easily, so Bella combs it through before Daisy goes to bed, where she will wake the next morning with her hair in fiery spikes again. Bella's full name is Belladonna, the name of another flower, a different kind from lilies or roses, daisies or buttercups. A flower that can be good for you, sometimes. Bella's mother understands plants, and belladonna had a special significance for her, she used to say. She's a herbalist, she knows these things. She likes to say, "The only difference between a poison and a remedy is the dose." Daisy is plucking at Bella's sleeve; she insists, her mouth beginning to twist into a cry, "Everyone in my class has a nanna. I'm the only one who hasn't." She spells out each word as if learning to pronounce it for the first time. "Your granny ..." Bella hesitates. Then she says, "Let me tell you a story, which will explain everything."

Abstract: Red Riding Hood for All Ages: A Fairy-Tale Icon in Cross-Cultural Contexts. By Sandra L. Beckett. Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 2008. 244 pp. Red Riding Hood jor All Ages is Sandra Beckett's second book devoted to retellings of the tale of Little Red Riding Hood. The first book, Recycling Red Riding Hood (2002), focused on contemporary versions of the fairy tale for children. Beckett's 2008 study, as her title announces, examines what she calls "crossover works" that appeal to children, adolescents, and adults in a wide range of international contexts. "The multiple layers of the short tale," as Beckett explains, "make it a perfect subject for multiple readerships" (3). Although Beckett looks at some works dating from the early and mid-twentieth century, most versions discussed in Red Riding Hood jor AU Ages have appeared since the 1970s and reflect current concerns and issues. Beckett includes both pictorial and textual reinterpretations of "Little Red Riding Hood" in her study. The many black-and-white drawings and color plates reproduced in Red Riding Hood jor AU Ages conclusively demonstrate the tale's continuing ability to inspire visual artists. Although repeatedly retold in words and images by previous generations, the tale has evidently not been "used up" or superannuated; on the contrary, as Beckett shows, it remains an inexhaustible source and resource for new generations of authors and illustrators. In addition, one of the important contributions of Beckett's book is its discussion of literary recastings of the fairy tale that have never before been translated into English and are inaccessible to most English-speaking readers. With the assistance of multhingual friends and colleagues, Beckett has been able to examine versions that have appeared to date only in Afrikaans, Catalan, Dutch, Hungarian, Japanese, Norwegian, Portuguese, and Swedish, among other languages, and that represent a large number of countries in several continents. Similarly, the impressive examples of modern revisualizations of Red Riding Hood's story assembled in this study also represent diverse styles and cultures. Each of the five chapters of Red Riding Hood jor All Ages has a distinct thematic focus. Chapter 1, "Cautionary Tales for Modern Riding Hoods," deals with versions in the venerable tradition of the Warnmarchen that rework the tale as a warning for women of all ages against abuse by rapacious men. The themes of violence and rape continue to predominate in many visual and verbal revisions of the story, bringing to mind (if such reminders are necessary) the age-old adage that the more some things change, the more they tend to stay the same. Chapter 2, "Contemporary Riding Hoods Come of Age," examines versions in which the initiatory aspect of the tale is foregrounded. The encounter with the wolf in these renditions serves the story of the heroine's coming of age and often entails her initiation into sexuality. In some of these retellings "Little Red Riding Hood" becomes a love story, a romance between girl and wolf, in which the cautionary tradition is obscured or forgotten. Chapters 3 to 5 consider various innovative approaches to the tale that focus on "wolfhood" rather than on girl-or womanhood. Chapter 3 presents the wolf's story from different perspectives, including first-person retellings by the wolf himself. …

Abstract: From April 22 through April 25, 2009, the conference on "The Fairy Tale after Angela Carter" was held at the University of East Anglia (UK) to mark the thirtieth anniversary of the publication of Angela Carter's The Bloody Chamber, a story collection that has had a profound and pervasive impact on our understanding of and engagement with the fairy tale. The objective of the conference was to use this important anniversary as an opportunity to reflect on the legacy of Angela Carter and to examine the state of the fairy tale and fairy-tale studies today. The following collection of essays is the product of that gathering. It represents only a small number of the papers presented over the four days of the conference; there were many similarly inspiring and insightful engagements with this burgeoning field of study that might have been included. The guest editors for this issue hope, however, that the selection gives an indication of the range and interdisciplinary vitality of the research that was showcased at the event. They also hope that it succeeds in delineating some of the common areas of dominant, emergent interest that became apparent in the course of the debates and discussions, particularly those that suggest future directions for research and writing in the field. One of the more persistent of these emerging themes concerns the relationship between fairy tales and nationalist or colonialist ideology, a theme that was addressed at the conference in three of the four keynote addresses (Donald Haase's, Cristina Bacchilega's, and Marina Warner's) and that is represented here by Haase's "Decolonizing Fairy-Tale Studies" and by Sara Hines's examination of how the collection practices employed in Andrew Lang's colored Fairy Books corroborate nineteenth-century discourses on colonialism and empire. Vassilena Parashkevova, in her contribution, also addresses the cultural significance of fairy tale by examining Githa Hariharan's subversive and transformatory engagement with the orientalist history of the Arabian Nights in the novel When Dreams Travel (1999). Another robust area of research in fairy-tale studies, as it became apparent in the course of the conference, concerns the intersection of fairy tale and film. Jack Zipes's keynote address focused on reutilizations of "Little Red Riding Hood" in recent films, and there were conference papers on Neil Jordan's Company of Wolves (1984), the films of the Walt Disney Company, Guillermo del Toro's Pan's Labyrinth (2006), and Mitchell Lichtenstein's Teeth (2008), among others. In the present collection this area of interest is represented by Susan CahiU's investigation of the representation of older women in Terry Gilliam's The Brothers Grimm (2005) and Matthew Vaughn's Stardust (2007), and by Sharon McCann's innovative analysis of The Company of Wolves, which explores the possibility that Jordan's primary concern in this film is less with the female psyche, as conventional criticism has tended to suggest, and more with the Irish "Troubles" that preoccupy him in several of his other films. Consideration of the work of contemporary writers who have, like Carter, used fairy tale as a springboard for imaginative invention has been one of the most buoyant areas of academic research in the field over the last thirty years. Papers at the conference indicated that interest in the area has not abated. There were new perspectives on the uses of fairy tale in the fiction of established writers such as A. …

Abstract: Artist Rima Staines offers three original drawings of the old woman in the woods based on the tales of "Baba Yaga," "Red Riding Hood," and "Hansel and Gretel." The artist's own introduction offers insights into the ideas and perspectives that she has drawn upon to shape and inform her visual representations of one of the fairy tale's most resonant characters.