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Return with New Complexities: Robert Coover's Briar Rose
Sünje Redies
This essay analyzes the use of postmodernist literary techniques in Robert Coover's novella Briar Rose. Metafiction, destabilization of diegesis, and conscious intertextuality are ways of engaging with literary traditions. As a metafictional narrative, Briar Rose reveals and flaunts the mechanisms of fictional creation of meaning. The result is a demystification of the fairy tale, retracing its history and questioning its standard interpretations. Coover's text stresses the sexual implications of the Sleeping Beauty tale and explores the workings of desire as a driving force of the story and its narration.
Salman Rushdie's Magical Kingdom: The Moor's Last Sigh and Fairy-Tale Utopia
Justyna Deszcz
This essay discusses how The Moor's Last Sigh (1995) can be regarded as Salman Rushdie's attempt to use a combination of Western and Eastern fairy-tale intertexts, including Washington Irving's The Alhambra (1832), to create his own fairy tale about utopian worlds, through which he participates in the postcolonial resistance to Euro-American representations of the Other. The concept of fairy-tale utopia used here draws from Ernst Bloch's notion of the utopian imagination. Although Rushdie delays the realization of his venture until the future, the novel's ending may be seen as a time-gaining operation legitimizing his postcolonial practice and providing him with an opportunity to fashion his own vision of India.
Escape from Wonderland: Disney and the Female Imagination
Deborah Ross
Three animated Disney features, Alice in Wonderland, The Little Mermaid, and Beauty and the Beast are shown here to reflect an ambivalence about freedom of imagination that may confuse young female viewers. The essay compares these three "girls' movies" with their fairy-tale sources and connects them to similarly ambivalent female narratives of an earlier time, particularly Charlotte Lennox's The Female Quixote. It further suggests that adults concerned about these movies' effects on children ought to look closely at the relationship among elements of dialogue, plot, and image.
Tam Lin, Fair Janet, and the Sexual Revolution: Traditional Ballads, Fairy Tales, and Twentieth-Century Children's Literature
Martha P. Hixon
Ballad tales, like fairy tales, perform a sociocultural function in that they exemplify standard codes of behavior in a given society. Also like fairy tales, ballads have been the subject of the late twentieth-century impulse to break down, reconstruct, and rewrite the traditional tales, either to appropriate the emotional cores of the tales through borrowing motifs, characters, or plot, or else to update the stories for new social agendas and values. This study looks at the sociocultural function of "Tam Lin," first in its traditional balladric format and then as it became modified and reconstructed in the twentieth century by authors and editors working in the field of children's literature.
TEXTS & TRANSLATIONS
Concha Castroviejo/Translated by Robert M. Fedorchek
This translation of "La tejedora de sueños" is representative of the collection El jardín de las siete puertas (The Garden with Seven Gates, 1961) by the twentieth-century Spanish author and journalist Concha Castroviejo. Like many another tale of wonder and enchantment, it tells the story of a lone little girl who ventures deep into a forest, and in this case it is to learn an occupation.
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