Contents of
Vol. 16, No. 2 (2002)

Editorial Policy

Guidelines for Submissions

Introduction to the Special Issue on "Jack Zipes and the Sociohistorical Study of Fairy Tales"

A Bibliography of Publications by Jack Zipes on Fairy Tales, Fantasy, and Children's Literature

ARTICLES

Written for Children: Two Eighteenth-Century English Fairy Tales

Gillian Avery

This essay discusses two eighteenth-century English literary fairy tales for children. The first, "The Dice Box," included by Horace Walpole in his six Hieroglyphic Tales (1785), written for the nine year-old niece of a friend, probably in 1757, is unique, surreal in its nonsense, Rabelaisian with sophisticated sexual innuendo. In sharp contrast Jane Johnson's "A Very Pretty Story," the earliest known English fairy tale for children, written in 1744 and published for the first time in 2001 by the Bodleian Library, Oxford, who have recently acquired the manuscript, is decorous and benign, and was extemporized by a mother for her two small children. Both authors draw on French sources, particularly on Marie-Catherine d'Aulnoy and, in Walpole's case, on Anthony Hamilton, and the article discusses the influence of these on eighteenth-century English writing.

Creating the Sensual Child: Paterian Aesthetics, Pederasty, and Oscar Wilde's Fairy Tales

Naomi Wood

Oscar Wilde's fairy tales encode the vision of an idealistic pederast, a man who loves beautiful youths; the style and content of his fairy tales offer a vision of love and beauty that urges a different aesthetic and moral relationship to the world and experience from other fairy tales for children. Wilde's fairy tales rhetorically create a new, morally sensual child by enacting Walter Pater's aesthetics. This essay explores Wilde's context in the homosexual subculture of Victorian Oxford, his aesthetics and their relation to Pater, and the ways his literary fairy tales encode and express a pederastic ethos through the particular focus on sensual experience and moral enlightenment.

Fairy Tales in Society's Service

Maria Nikolajeva

Jack Zipes has repeatedly demonstrated that fairy tales have an enormous subversive potential. The nature of subversion, however, may vary radically depending on the society in which fairy tales appear. This essay shows how fairy tales based on the wish-granting motif functioned in the former Soviet Union, a society in which art and literature were strongly subordinated to the official ideology. Through an examination of four stories, it is demonstrated how the Communist ideology permeating the texts came into conflict with their liberating effect and how different narrative strategies were used to subdue the subversive elements.

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

Jan Susina

Using Walter Benjamin's concept of the flâneur as well as the theories of postmodern geography, this essay situates Francesca Lia Block's Weetzie Bat (1989) as both a literary fairy tale for adolescents and a realistic description of postmodern Los Angeles. While Block's "Shangri-L.A." is influenced by traditional fairy tales and film, it simultaneously functions as a travelogue and memoir of Block's childhood in Los Angeles. Weetzie Bat confirms Jack Zipes's assertion that fairy tales embody an historical context and the ideological assumptions of the period in which they are produced.

Utopia, Dystopia, and Cultural Controversy in Ever After and The Grimm Brothers' Snow White

John Stephens and Robyn McCallum

Two film retellings of fairy tales from the 1990s exemplify how familiar fairy tales can be reshaped to address major cultural preoccupations. On the one hand, the utopian narrative Ever After affirms neohumanistic values such as deep memory, knowable origins, and teleology in narrative and culture. In contrast, The Grimm Brothers' Snow White is postmodernist and dystopian, hybridizing apocalyptic and Gothic narrative structures and themes, and drawing on modern phenomena such as "the beauty myth," to present characters playing out an old story to an outcome which resists both teleology and closure.

Orality, History, and "Creoleness" in Patrick Chamoiseau's Creole Folktales

Lewis C. Seifert

Patrick Chamoiseau's Creole Folktales (1988) makes a concerted effort to reproduce the oral storytelling of the Creole slaves of the French Antilles in order to explore and promote the cultural and literary notion of "Creoleness." In his collection, Chamoiseau reworks the themes of hunger, dreams, and speech so central to Creole oral narratives. But Creole Folktales is anything but a collection of folkloric transcriptions. By rewriting Creole folktales, Chamoiseau valorizes the orality of the Creole past as a means of unsettling the fixity of writing as defined by the colonial and postcolonial West.

TEXTS & TRANSLATIONS

Bare Bones

Joellyn Rock

Buried among the world's heap of Cinder tales, is the Russian version, in its multiple incarnations. "Bare Bones" is a retelling of this story about Vasalisa and her encounter with Baba Yaga. By reshaping its text, imagery and format, I build a bridge between traditional and digital media. The text, as broken down into nodes, is meant for an interactive story environment. "Bare Bones" is one piece of a larger digital fairy tale, which is more visually and textually complex. Duplicated, mistranslated, and subverted, fairy tales have been hijacked throughout history for various uses. "Bare Bones" owes much to Jack Zipes, who continues to enlighten and inform this work.

From the Baroque to the Postmodern: Notes on a Translation from Giambattista Basile's The Tale of Tales

Nancy L. Canepa

This contribution offers one of Giambattista Basile's most suggestive, scintillating, and disturbing tales--"The Old Woman Who Was Skinned"--in full translation. The translation is accompnaied by a commentary in two sets of footnotes. One set of notes explores how Basile revisits fairy-tale form and content, and how his highly original rhetorical strategies become an integral part of this process. These notes also investigate affinities between Basile's aesthetic sensibility and those of our own--postmodern--time, and reflect briefly on the challenges in translating such a text. A second set of notes offers information on social, historical, cultural, and politicals aspects of everyday life in seventeenth-century Naples.

Seven Brooms

Jack Zipes

"Seven Brooms" is a retelling of a Neapolitan tale, "Cunto d' 'e duie mercante" ("The Tale of Two Merchants"), which was originally recorded from oral tradition and published in the late nineteenth century. Based on a tale that involves family rivalries, class differences, and a valaorous daughter, this literary retelling in colloquial English incorporates significant changes that create more color, clarity, and consistency, and that stress the feminist feature of the story.

Reviews

Critical Exchanges

Contributors

Index to Volume 16 (2002)