Special Issue: "Considering the Kunstmärchen: The History and Development of Literary Fairy Tales"
Guest Editors: Andrea Immel and Jan Susina
Editorial Policy
Guidelines for Submissions
From the Editor
ARTICLES
Introduction: Literary Fairy Tales and the Value of Impurity
U. C. Knoepflmacher
The self-conscious revisionism of the literary fairy tale is a mark of its resilience. Challenging a purism exemplified by "Frauds on the Fairies," an essay in which Dickens imposes rigid sexual binaries on "Cendrillon," I explore the gender transpositions that link the experimentalism of MacDonald to Perrault, before connecting the innovative fictions of Brontë and Woolf, as well as of Alcott and Burnett, to the male and female representations of "Cinderella," "Sleeping Beauty," and Beaumont's "Beauty and the Beast." Conceived as a meditation on the vital endurance of "impure" literary forms and as a demonstration of seldom-made intertextual relations, my essay also introduces the offerings of the various contributors to this special issue.
"Entertainment for Little Ones"?: Basile's Lo cunto de li cunti and the Childhood of the Literary Fairy Tale
Nancy L. Canepa
The two principal aims of this essay are: first, to consider the place of Basile's Lo cunto de li cunti in the early history of the literary fairy tale, the author's "creation" of a new audience for a new genre, and, in particular, his position with respect to the popular culture that supplies much of his material; and second, to analyze two tales--"Petrosinella" and "The Old Woman Who Was Skinned"--in order both to compare Basile's to later collections and to investigate the characteristics that make Lo cunto unique.
The Poetics of Enchantment (1690-1715)
Christine Jones
Christine Jones addresses the woman teller's identity in the literary fairy tales of France. She rereads prefaces and images that scholars have used to demonstrate the woman teller's literarity to argue rather for her "frivolity," a word the women themselves use to describe their writing. She finds that frivolity is an aesthetic principle at the heart of the women's poetic project that marks their difference from even the Modern partisans of the great literary debate. The principle of frivolity is captured in an image that recurs in prefaces by the writers: the "modern" fairy.
Male Adolescence in German Fairy-Tale Novellas of the Enlightenment, Romanticism, and Biedermeier
Hans-Heino Ewers
To a great extent fairy tales are stories about first love, which end with the final union of the couple. They are thus automatically family stories dealing with the children's successful or unsuccessful detachment from the parents' law. Looked at from this point of view, the German fairy-tale novella and fairy-tale drama of the early nineteenth century, especially where they address young readers, favor antimodern and anti-emancipatory plots. In comparison with the splendid and successful love stories of the fairy-tale heroes of the eighteenth century, the love affairs of the nineteenth century end rather badly. At the worst the protagonists give up any wedding plans and return to their families (e.g., Hauff's "Zwerg Nase"), which mirrors to a large extent the German conservative social history of the nineteenth century.
"A Fairytale Is Just a Fairytale": George MacDonald and the Queering of Fairy
Roderick McGillis
This essay acknowledges George MacDonald's sense of the fairy tale as a feminine form, expressive of imaginative and nonrational modes of thought. But most of his fantasy work delivers a dual world, a world in which fantasy and reality intersect. More precisely, his world exists on the border between fantasy and reality. I extrapolate from this border position to meditate on gender in MacDonald's fairy tales. My conclusion is that MacDonald envisages a world of fairy that we can suitably term "queer."
"Like the fragments of coloured glass in a kaleidoscope": Andrew Lang Mixes Up Richard Doyle's In Fairyland
Jan Susina
In the preface to The Grey Fairy Book (1900), Andrew Lang argues that fairy tales are essentially composed of "[a] certain number of incidents" that can then be shaken "into many various combinations of incidents, like the fragments of coloured glass in a kaleidoscope." This is the closest the folklorist came to explaining his method of composition for The Princess Nobody: A Tale of Fairy Land (1884), his literary fairy tale based on rearranging Richard Doyle's illustrations for In Fairyland: A Series of Pictures from the Elf-World (1870).
Using William Thackeray's The Rose and the Ring (1855) as his model, Lang manipulated Doyle's previously published illustrations by reordering them, cutting them up, and omitting others to create a new pattern for his literary fairy tale in a surprisingly postmodern fashion. Nevertheless, Doyle's illustrations continue to resist Lang and other writers' attempts to explain or control them. Doyle's In Fairyland establishes the Victorian iconography of fairies, bridging the Victorian interest in visual narratives and the fascination of the fairy world, and anticipating the increasing significance of the visual in the twentieth-century narratives.
Arthur Hughes, Walter Crane, and Maurice Sendak: The Picture as Literary Fairy Tale
George Bodmer
Illustrations, in reinterpreting and extending traditional fairy tales, act as literary fairy tales, adding more images and stories to our culture as they depart from the original source material. Victorian Arthur Hughes through his wood engravings embellished the stories of George MacDonald, as Walter Crane did to Grimm, and both influenced contemporary picture-book artist Maurice Sendak, who copied the look of wood engravings for his versions of Grimm and MacDonald. The restrictions of this improvement over the wood cut created a contrast of light and dark that these artists found appropriate to their readings of Victorian fairy tales.
Fairy Tale and Fantasy: From Archaic to Postmodern
Maria Nikolajeva
The essay discusses the ontological, structural, and epistemological differences between fairy tales and fantasy literature, two genres often treated together in critical works. Using contemporary theories of the fantastic, it is argued that unlike fairy tales, with their origin in archaic thought, fantasy literature is firmly anchored in twentieth-century science and philosophy, especially the postmodern concepts of uncertainty, intersubjectivity, heterotopia, and heteroglossia. The characteristic features of postmodern fantasy literature are illustrated by the works of Diana Wynne Jones, Philip Pullman, Susan Cooper, and Russell Hoban.
Reviews
Critical Exchanges
Professional Notices
Contributors