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  • Cinderella across Cultures: New Directions and Interdisciplinary Perspectives ed. by Martine Hennard Dutheil de la Rochère, Gillian Lathey and Monika Woźniak
  • Martha Hixon (bio)
Cinderella across Cultures: New Directions and Interdisciplinary Perspectives. Edited by Martine Hennard Dutheil de la Rochère, Gillian Lathey, and Monika Woźniak. Detroit: Wayne State UP, 2016.

The twenty-sixth volume to date in Wayne State University Press’s Fairy-Tale Studies series edited by Donald Haase, Cinderella across Cultures is the twenty-first-century answer to Alan Dundes’s 1982 Cinderella: A Casebook. In that innovative approach to the study of a folktale spread across cultures, time, and disciplines, Dundes pulled together essays examining the roots of the Cinderella story in Italy, China, Germany, and France; extended that scope to stories of Cinderella in Russia, Greece, Africa, and Iran; and added in essays taking psychological, folkloristic, and linguistic approaches to understanding the motifs of the story. Cinderella across Cultures takes a similar interdisciplinary approach, with essays that continue to examine the roots of the story in Italy, France, Germany, and China, drawing from the fields of media studies, translation and adaptation, illustration, literature, and folkloristics. Several of the essays consider how a particular culture and time period shape the tale in specific ways, while others discuss the fluidity [End Page 111] of Cinderella’s gender and sexual orientation as she has been updated to reflect late twentieth-century social values. Cristina Bacchilega observes in the foreword that “this book exemplifies the interdisciplinary and transnational discourse of contemporary fairy-tale studies that seeks to foreground a fairy-tale text’s situatedness as well as to historicize its intertextuality” (xiii). Thus it explores the mutability that is the life force of folk- and fairy tales, their ability to adapt to a myriad of cultural contexts and shifting frameworks and purposes while still maintaining the individual and distinctive story core.

Cinderella across Cultures grew out of an international and interdisciplinary conference held in Rome in 2012; the collected essays reflect these origins in that the focus of the book is Eurocentric rather than Anglo-American, and the editors admit to “primarily centering on the European fairy-tale tradition” (16). This focus is most apparent in the third section of the volume, in which two thirds of the essays discuss current European versions of the tale in some fashion; there are no essays in the book focusing on Disney (though the name is certainly evoked from time to time), and little attention is given to the most popular American versions of the tale. Yet this focus does not limit the usefulness of the book for Anglo-American scholars—in fact, the scope of its scholarship contributes to a much-needed broader understanding of the wide-ranging appeal of this story, purportedly one of the oldest folktales in existence.

The eighteen essays in Cinderella across Cultures are divided into three broad sections: “Contextualizing Cinderella,” “Regendering Cinderella,” and “Visualizing Cinderella.” The introduction provides a succinct and informative overview of the history of the story of Cinderella in terms of both academic treatment and the story variations that have existed over the centuries. The first section then leads off with Ruth Bottigheimer’s “The People’s Princess,” an insightful discussion of how the European Cinderella morphed from an aristocratic manipulator in Basile’s “Cat Cinderella” to a pure-hearted model of goodness in Perrault’s story, to the “people’s princess” of the 1950 American film by Walt Disney. Following Bottigheimer’s essay is Kathryn Hoffman’s “object study,” to use her term (52), a historical look at how objects mentioned in tales can be seen as cultural codes laden with meaning and associations for the tales’ audiences: in this case, how glass in the seventeenth-century French and Italian tales was a mark of purity as well as of magic. This essay, which includes several paragraphs detailing the “fur” versus “glass” theory about Perrault’s protagonist’s footwear, provides little-known historical background that is useful in contextualizing how this image of a shoe made of glass would have resonated with seventeenth-century audiences. The subsequent essays in this section focus on Robert Samber as the...

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