Fairy-Tale Studies

As in the United States, fairy-tale characters, motifs, and patterns (many from the Western canon) have pervaded recent Japanese culture. Like their Western counterparts, these contemporary adaptations tend to have a more female-oriented perspective than traditional tales and feature female characters with independent spirits.In From Dog Bridegroom to Wolf Girl: Contemporary Japanese Fairy-Tale Adaptations in Conversation with the West,Mayako Murai examines the uses of fairy tales in the works of Japanese women writers and artists since the 1990s in the light of Euro-American feminist fairy-tale re-creation and scholarship.After giving a sketch of the history of the reception of European fairy tales in Japan since the late nineteenth century, Murai outlines the development of fairy-tale retellings and criticism in Japan since the 1970s. Chapters that follow examine the uses of fairy-tale intertexts in the works of four contemporary writers and artists that resist and disrupt the domina

A wide variety of creatures walk, fly, leap, slither, and swim through fairy-tale history. Some marvelous animal characters are deeply inscribed in current popular culture—the beast redeemed by beauty

The stories in the Grimm brothers' Kinder- und Hausmarchen (Children's and Household Tales), first published in 1812 and 1815, have come to define academic and popular understandings of the fairy tale

In Critical and Creative Perspectives on Fairy Tales: An Intertextual Dialogue between Fairy-Tale Scholarship and Postmodern Retellings Vanessa Joosen broadens the traditional concept of intertextuali

Vladimir Propp is the Russian folklore specialist most widely known outside Russia thanks to the impact of his 1928 book Morphology of the Folktale-but Morphology is only the first of Propp's contribu

The Broken Spell: Indian Storytelling and the Romance Genre in Persian and Urdu is a monograph on the rise and fall in popularity of "romances" (qissah)&

The Broken Spell: Indian Storytelling and the Romance Genre in Persian and Urdu is a monograph on the rise and fall in popularity of "romances" (qissah)&

Craving Supernatural Creatures: German Fairy-Tale Figures in American Pop Culture analyzes supernatural creatures in order to demonstrate how German fairy tales treat difference, alterity, and Otherness with terror, distance, and negativity, whereas contemporary North American popular culture adaptations navigate diversity by humanizing and redeeming such figures. This trend of transformation reflects a greater tolerance of other marginalized groups (in regard to race, ethnicity, ability, age, gender, sexual orientation, social class, religion, etc.) and acceptance of diversity in society today. The fairy-tale adaptations examined here are more than just twists on old stories—they serve as the looking glasses of significant cultural trends, customs, and social challenges. Whereas the fairy-tale adaptations that Claudia Schwabe analyzes suggest that Otherness can and should be fully embraced, they also highlight the gap that still exists between the represent

Craving Supernatural Creatures: German Fairy-Tale Figures in American Pop Culture analyzes supernatural creatures in order to demonstrate how German fairy tales treat diffe

Marina Colasanti is a Brazilian journalist, visual artist, and author of over sixty volumes of short stories, poetry, essays, and children’s literature. Her books have been translated i

Teaching Fairy Tales edited by Nancy L. Canepa brings together scholars who have contributed to the field of fairy-tale studies since its origins. This collection offers in

Teaching Fairy Tales edited by Nancy L. Canepa brings together scholars who have contributed to the field of fairy-tale studies since its origins. This collection offers information on materials, critical approaches and ideas, and pedagogical resources for the teaching of fairy tales in one comprehensive source that will further help bring fairy-tale studies into the academic mainstream.The volume begins by posing some of the big questions that stand at the forefront of fairy-tale studies: How should we define the fairy tale? What is the "classic" fairy tale? Does it make sense to talk about a fairy-tale canon? The first chapter includes close readings of tales and their variants, in order to show how fairy tales aren’t simple, moralizing, and/or static narratives. The second chapter focuses on essential moments and documents in fairy-tale history, investigating how we gain unique perspectives on cultural history through reading fairy tale

In nineteenth-century Britain, the spectacular and highly profitable theatrical form known as "pantomime" was part of a shared cultural repertoire and a significant medium for the transmissio

In nineteenth-century Britain, the spectacular and highly profitable theatrical form known as "pantomime" was part of a shared cultural repertoire and a significant medium for the transmissio

Lucy Fraser’s The Pleasures of Metamorphosis: Japanese and English Fairy-Tale Transformations of "The Little Mermaid" explores Japanese and English transformations of Hans Christian Andersen’s 1837 Danish fairy tale "The Little Mermaid" by focusing on pleasure as a means to analyze the huge variety of texts that transform a canonical fairy tale such as Andersen’s. Fraser examines over twenty Japanese and English transformations, including literary texts, illustrated books, films, and television series. This monograph also draws upon criticism in both Japanese and English, meeting a need in Western fairy-tale studies for more culturally diverse perspectives. Fraser provides a model for critical cross-cultural fairy tale analysis in her examination of the journey of a single fairy tale across two languages. The book begins with the various approaches to reading and writing fairy tales, with a history of "The Little Mermaid" in Japanese and English culture. Disney’s The Little Mermaid and

The Thousand and One Days, a companion collection to The Thousand and One Nights, was published in 1710–1712 by French Orientalist scholar François Pétis de la Croix who advertised it as the faithful, albeit selective translation of a Persian work. Subsequent research has found that The Thousand and One Days is actually the adapted translation of a fifteenth-century anonymous Ottoman Turkish compilation titled Relief after Hardship. This compliation, in turn, is the enlarged translation of an equally anonymous Persian collection of tales that likely dates back to as early as the thirteenth century. The tales in both the Ottoman Turkish and the Persian collections are mostly tales of the marvelous and the strange, a genre that dominated much of the narrative literatures of the pre-modern Muslim world.Ulrich Marzolph’s Relief after Hardship: The Ottoman Turkish Model for The Thousand and One Days is a detailed assessment of the Ottoman Turkish compilation and its Persian precursor. Based

Charles Perrault published Histoires ou Contes du temps passe ("Stories or Tales of the Past") in France in 1697 during what scholars call the first "vogue" of tales produced by learned French writers. The genre that we now know so well was new and an uncommon kind of literature in the epic world of Louis XIV’s court. This inaugural collection of French fairy tales features characters like Sleeping Beauty, Blue Beard, and Puss-in-Boots that over the course of the eighteenth century became icons of social history in France and abroad. Translating the original Histoires ou Contes means grappling not only with the strangeness of seventeenth-century French but also with the ubiquity and familiarity of plots and heroines in their famous English personae. From its very first translation in 1729, Histoires ou Contes has depended heavily on its English translation for enduring recognition and the genesis of character names. This dependable recognition makes new, innovative translation challeng

The Cinderella story is retold continuously in literature, illustration, music, theatre, ballet, opera, film, and other media, and folklorists have recognized hundreds of distinct forms of Cinderella plots worldwide. The focus of this volume, however, is neither Cinderella as an item of folklore nor its alleged universal meaning. In Cinderella across Cultures, editors Martine Hennard Dutheil de la Rochere, Gillian Lathey, and Monika Wozniak analyze the Cinderella tale as a fascinating, multilayered, and ever-changing story constantly reinvented in different media and traditions.The collection highlights the tale’s reception and adaptation in cultural and national contexts across the globe, including those of Italy, France, Germany, Britain, the Netherlands, Poland, and Russia. Contributors shed new light on classic versions of Cinderella by examining the material contexts that shaped them (such as the development of glass artifacts and print techniques), or by analyzing their reception

The Tale of Tales, made up of forty-nine fairy tales within a fiftieth frame story, contains the earliest versions of celebrated stories like Rapunzel, All-Fur, Hansel and Gretel, The Goose That Laid

From Paul Verhoeven’s The Cold Heart in 1950 to Konrad Petzold’s The Story of the Goose Princess and Her Loyal Horse Falada in 1989, East Germany’s state-sponsored film company, DEFA (Deutsche Film-Ak

In the thirty-five years since the publication of The Bloody Chamber, Angela Carter’s reimagined fairy tales have inspired an impressive body of criticism. Yet none has addressed the ways her fairy ta

Although dozens of disabled characters appear in the Grimms’ Children’s and Household Tales, the issue of disability in their collection has remained largely unexplored by scholars. In Disability, Def

Television has long been a familiar vehicle for fairy tales and is, in some ways, an ideal medium for the genre. Both more mundane and more wondrous than cinema, TV magically captures sounds and image

Grimms’ fairy tales are among the best-known stories in the world, but the way they have been introduced into and interpreted by cultures across the globe has varied enormously. In Grimms’ Tales around the Globe, editors Vanessa Joosen and Gillian Lathey bring together scholars from Asia, Europe, and North and Latin America to investigate the international reception of the Grimms’ tales. The essays in this volume offer insights into the social and literary role of the tales in a number of countries and languages, finding aspects that are internationally constant as well as locally particular. In the first section, Cultural Resistance and Assimilation, contributors consider the global history of the reception of the Grimms’ tales in a range of cultures. In these eight chapters, scholars explore how cunning translators and daring publishers around the world reshaped and rewrote the tales, incorporating them into existing fairy-tale traditions, inspiring new writings, and often introducin

In translating Charles Perrault's seventeenth-century Histoires ou contes du temps passe, avec des Moralites into English, Angela Carter worked to modernize the language and message of the tales befor

Across various time periods, audiences, aesthetics, and cultural landscapes, Little Red Riding Hood is a universal icon, and her story is one of the world's most retold tales. In Revisioning Red Ridin

Fairy-tale adaptations are ubiquitous in modern popular culture, but readers and scholars alike may take for granted the many voices and traditions folded into today's tales. In Fairy Tales Transforme

To the uninitiated, the films of French New Wave director Jacques Demy can seem strange and even laughable, with their gaudy color schemes and sung dialogue. Yet since the late 1990s, a generation of

Despite the availability of several eloquent gender studies of fairy tales, a popular reference on men and fairy tales has so far been nonexistent. Brothers and Beasts offers a new perspective by allo