POSTMODERN REINTERPRETATIONS OF FAIRY TALES How Applying New Methods Generates New Meanings (2025)

Postmodern Reinterpretations of Fairy Tales: How Applying New Methods Generates New Meanings. Edited by Anna Kérchy. Foreword by Martine Hennard Dutheil de la Rochère. (review)

Marvels and Tales 26.2, 2012

The Columbia Anthology of Chinese Folk and Popular Literature is the first large-scale anthology of the folk literature of China ever published in the West, and the compilation of such an anthology is indeed an ambitious undertaking: it has to cover a period of about 3,000 years and should include, besides the Han Chinese "majority people," more than fifty "minority peoples." The editors have resolved the problem of how to select representative samples from such an immense corpus very well by choosing twenty-five folktales from eleven minority groups as well as some Han Chinese dragon tales; more than seventy folk songs and-often neglected-samples of ritual literature from a number of ethnic groups and the Han Chinese; and epic literature with samples, for instance, from the Mongolian Geser and Jangar and from the Miluotuo creation myth of the Southern Chinese Yao. Next follow texts from Han Chinese folk drama. The second half of the volume is devoted exclusively to Han Chinese professional storytelling (with two samples from the Bai minority). These texts, which raise conflicts but almost completely lack elements of the märchen, are often tragic love stories and other life stories imbued with Confucian and Buddhist values.

Rewriting the Core: Transformations of the Fairy-tale in Contemporary Writing

Theoretical interest in fairy-tales from the 1970s onwards made them at once transparent, suggestive, and flexible. The result was a surge of rewritings of a core-group of fairy-tales, often by feminist writers. This piece considers the move from theory to practice, and why the move proved so successful on every level.

Reinvigorating the Fairy Tale

Re-Orienting and Disorienting Fairy-Tale Studies

Eger Journal of English Studies

Review. Re-Orienting the Fairy Tale: Contemporary Adaptations across Cultures. Edited by Mayako Murai and Luciana Cardi. Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 2020. Pp. 424. ISBN 978-0-8143-4536-8.

Challenging the Archetypes: Re-visitation of Fairy Tales

2020

This study aims to highlight how the revisited American fairytale movies shun the archetypal symbols, characters and situations of the previous fairy tales. The researcher analyzes the new set of norms that are proposed by the postmodernists, which are positioned to shun the metanarratives and work against totality by waging war against it (Lyotard 71-82). The perspective in doing so is to find out the changes in the original stories which have challenged the collective unconsciousness. Collective Unconscious, according to Jung, are the unconscious feelings present among human beings as species. They are universally present in every man's psyche, and the unconscious of man has some primal images, which are depicted through symbols. These symbols are not limited to any particular culture or history (Four Archetypes 4). Jung calls the contents of the collective unconscious the "archetypes" (4). Postmodernists have challenged the archetypal patterns stated by the philosop...

Breaking the Magic Spell: Radical Theories of Folk and Fairy Tales (review)

Children's Literature Association Quarterly, 1981

If a critique of everyday life is to become a serious undertaking, virtually everything we experience needs to be subjected to careful and critical scrutiny. Even fairy tales. Like so much else in modern culture, these tales may not be as innocuous as they appear. To the extent that the culture industry has appropriated them and uses their motifs to manipulate consciousness or shape behavior, especially in children, fairy tales may be more effective as instruments of social control than one would think. Perhaps for this reason the study of these tales is too important to be left to folklore aficionados or specialists in children's literature. Two groups have recently noticed the larger social or psychological importance of fairy tales, and have tried to approach them in original ways. The first are the psychotherapists, whose work has lately gained some attention, and the second are the Marxists, whose work remains practically unknown in this country. The psychotherapists have turned to fairy tale material to see what it might reveal about certain psychic states, the meaning of dream symbolism, recurrent Oedipal and incest motifs, or stages in sexual development. In the Freudian tradition, one can find most of these themes as far back as the early work of Karl Abraham (1909), Otto Rank (1912), and Freud himself (1913). 1 Bruno Bettelheim's much publicized The Uses of Enchantment (1974) must also be placed in this tradition. However, there is another, a Jungian, line of interpretation that has contributed even more extensively to fairy tale research. Not surprisingly, this line discovers not primarily Oedipal or sexual themes, but collective archetypes, shadow figures, Great Mothers, anima and animus symbols, and the like. Besides Jung's own essay on the subject of fairy tales (1954), there are more exhaustive studies in this vein by two of his disciples, Marie-Louise von Franz and Hedwig von Beit. 2 The others who have recently taken a closer look at folk and fairy tales are the Marxist (or Marxist-informed) scholars, particularly those in Germany. One can find the tentative beginnings of a radical approach to the tales in parts of Ernst Bloch's Erbschaft dieser Zeit (1935) and Das Prinzip Hoffnung (1938-1947), but these starting points have been developed in a more complete way in the contemporary work of August Nitschke, Dieter Richter, Johannes Merkel, and others. 3 Zipes' new book comes directly out of this second tradition. His main concern is elucidating the social rather than the psychological meanings and values contained in folk or fairy tales. If there is any "liberation" to be achieved by creatively working through the tales, Zipes wants it to be not simply personal or mental, but social and cultural liberation as well. By looking at matters from this perspective, he significantly changes the questions usually asked of fairy tales. He also helps alter the focus of

Towards a Social History of the Literary Fairy Tale for Children

1982

Fairy Tale Futures: Critical Reflections

2020

This article provides critical reflections on Stijn Praet and Anna Kérchy’s edited collection, The Fairy Tale Vanguard: Literary Self-Consciousness in a Marvelous Genre (2019). Vanguard can be defined as “the foremost part of an advancing army or naval force,” with established and emerging critics marching in defence of the fairy tale against the genre’s complicated reception throughout the ages. The form’s self-consciousness and intertextual complexity is foregrounded, with fairy tale experiments ranging from those of 17th-century French female conteuses, to modernist short stories and contemporary films, which all combine into a celebration of the genre’s sophistication and continued relevance. The book engages with the generic complexity of the fairy tale, defying any kind of neat categorisation. ‘Fairy tale’ often functions as a ‘catch-all’ term for different fairy tale narratives, but this study paves the way for reflections on new subgenres such as the ‘anti-tale’. Finally, it...

Relevance of Fairy Tales

Ever other : unsettling subjects in contemporary revisions of fairy tales

Stellenbosch : Stellenbosch University, 2017

By submitting this dissertation electronically, I declare that the entirety of the work contained therein is my own, original work, that I am the sole author thereof (save to the extent explicitly otherwise stated), that reproduction and publication thereof by Stellenbosch University will not infringe any third party rights and that I have not previously in its entirety or in part submitted it for obtaining any qualification. This dissertation includes one original paper published in a peer-reviewed journal or book and no unpublished publications. The development and writing of the papers (published and unpublished) were the principal responsibility of myself and, for each of the cases where this is not the case, a declaration is included in the dissertation indicating the nature and extent of the contributions of co-authors.