Fairy Tales and Feminism: New Approaches

by Donald Haase (Editor)

Overview

In the 1970s, feminists focused critical attention on fairy tales and broke the spell that had enchanted readers for centuries. By exposing the role of fairy tales in the cultural struggle over gender, feminism transformed fairy-tale studies and sparked a debate that would change the way society thinks about fairy tales and the words "happily ever after." Now, after three decades of provocative criticism and controversy, this book reevaluates the feminist critique of fairy tales. The eleven essays within Fairy Tales and Feminism challenge and rethink conventional wisdom about the fairy-tale heroine and offer new insights into the tales produced by female writers and storytellers. Resisting a one-dimensional view of the woman-centered fairy tale, each essay reveals ambiguities in female-authored tales and the remarkable potential of classical tales to elicit unexpected responses from women. Exploring new texts and contexts, Fairy Tales and Feminism reaches out beyond the national and cultural boundaries that have limited our understanding of the fairy tale. The authors reconsider the fairy tale in French, German, and Anglo-American contexts and also engage African, Indian Ocean, Iberian, Latin American, Indo-Anglian, and South Asian diasporic texts. Also considered within this volume is how film, television, advertising, and the Internet test the fairy tale's boundaries and its traditional authority in defining gender. From the Middle Ages to the postmodern age-from the French fabliau to Hollywood's Ever After and television's Who Wants to Marry a Millionaire?-the essays assembled here cover a broad range of topics that map new territory for fairy-tale studies. Framed by a critical survey of feminist fairy-tale scholarship and an extensive bibliography-the most comprehensive listing of women-centered fairy-tale research ever assembled-Fairy Tales and Feminism is a valuable resource for anyone interested in the intersection of fairy tales and feminism.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780814340820
Publisher:	Wayne State University Press
Publication date:	08/18/2004
Series:	The Donald Haase Series in Fairy-Tale Studies
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	288
File size:	3 MB
Age Range:	18 Years

About the Author

Donald Haase is chair of the Department of German and Slavic Studies at Wayne State University. He is editor of The Reception of Grimm's Fairy Tales: Responses, Reactions, Revisions and general editor of Marvels & Tales: Journal of Fairy-Tale Studies.

Table of Contents

	Preface	vii
1	Feminist Fairy-Tale Scholarship	1
2	Fertility Control and the Birth of the Modern European Fairy-Tale Heroine	37
3	On Fairy Tales, Subversion, and Ambiguity: Feminist Approaches to Seventeenth-Century Contes de fees	53
4	German Fairy Tales: A User's Manual. Translations of Six Frames and Fragments by Romantic Women	73
5	The Mirror Broken: Women's Autobiography and Fairy Tales	99
6	Fire and Water: A Journey into the Heart of a Story	113
7	The Fairy-Tale Intertext in Iberian and Latin American Women's Writing	129
8	Babes in the Bosque: Fairy Tales in Twentieth-Century Argentine Women's Writing	149
9	Creolization as Agency in Woman-Centered Folktales	169
10	Genre and Gender in the Cultural Reproduction of India as "Wonder" Tale	179
11	Disrupting the Boundaries of Genre and Gender: Postmodernism and the Fairy Tale	197
	Bibliography	213
	Contributors	243
	Index	247