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  • Fairy Tales Transformed? Twenty-First-Century Adaptations and the Politics of Wonder by Cristina Bacchilega
  • Veronica L. Schanoes (bio)
Fairy Tales Transformed? Twenty-First-Century Adaptations and the Politics of Wonder. By Cristina Bacchilega. Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 2013. 290pp.

Cristina Bacchilega’s Fairy Tales Transformed? Twenty-First-Century Adaptations and the Politics of Wonder is a theoretically sophisticated analysis of contemporary cultural and artistic uses of fairy tales. It emphasizes local epistemologies as key to reinvigorating the “poetics and politics of wonder,” a phrase Bacchilega uses to refer to the power dynamics at stake in the telling, reading, and watching of fairy tales (ix). The purpose of this project, Bacchilega writes, is to “direct our attention to the significance of orality and located epistemologies in multimedia fairy-tale traditions and to the relationship of folk and fairy tales with other cultures’ wonder genres” (196). In doing so, she directs her readers as well to a variety of unusual fairy-tale adaptations and provides convincing, complex analyses that coalesce into a wide-ranging and compelling examination of what she terms the contemporary “fairy-tale web” (27).

Bacchilega introduces and develops the term fairy-tale web in the book’s Introduction, in which she describes the significant changes that have taken place in the field of fairy-tale adaptations, revisions, and media since the [End Page 182] fairy-tale renaissance of the 1970s. She notes that visionary writers such as Angela Carter have since become revered elders and sources themselves for contemporary fairy-tale adapters, and she directs our attention to the explosion of “trans-media” fairy-tale work to be found on the Internet (74). Bacchilega figures the current landscape as a web that allows scholars to understand “the construction of a history and remapping of the genre that are not insulated from the power structures and struggles of capitalism, colonialism, coloniality, and disciplinarity; and to envision current fairy-tale cultural practices in an intertextual dialogue with one another that is informed not only by the interests of the entertainment or culture industry and the dynamics of globalization . . . but also by more multivocal and unpredictable uses of the genre” (18). In this introductory chapter Bacchilega lays out several core questions for the book, asking what the stakes are in contemporary fairy-tale adaptations both within a European cultural framework and when relocated to non-Western wonder genres and traditions as well as the uses to which The Arabian Nights has been put in a cultural context where European fairy tales dominate.

Chapter 1, “Activist Responses: Adaptation, Remediation, and Relocation,” surveys the literature theorizing intertextuality and adaptation and moves beyond texts to include social activism in the fairy-tale web. Bacchilega analyzes Skin Folk (2002) by Nalo Hopkinson and Kissing the Witch (1993) by Emma Donoghue, arguing that these two writers use relocation as a relational rather than an oppositional framework for the transformation of fairy tales and that their use of specific located knowledges is a way of decolonizing our understanding of intertexts.

It is in Chapters 2 and 3 that the book really hits its stride. In Chapter 2, “Double Exposures: Reading (in) Fairy-Tale Films,” Bacchilega provides beautifully clear and insightful analyses of provocative films and is particularly good on Guillermo Del Toro’s Pan’s Labyrinth (2006), Pil-Sung Yim’s Hansel and Gretel (2007), and Catherine Breillat’s Bluebeard (2009). She situates her analyses in transmedia’s convergence culture and in fan cultures both official and unofficial. She also emphasizes the importance of moving beyond gender only in understanding the various power dynamics that inform fairy tales and their retellings, including those between children and adults and/or those between women.

Chapter 3, “Fairy Tale Remix in Film: Genres, Histories, and Economies,” brings Bacchilega’s detail-oriented and sophisticated focus to theories of genres, interrogating hierarchies of value, both geopolitical and canonical. By comparing several movies with varying distributions and budgets, such as Pan’s Labyrinth (2006), Enchanted (2007), Year of the Fish (2007), and Dance Hall Queen (1997), Bacchilega articulates a theory of genre creolization as [End Page 183] opposed to genre hybridity, defining creolization as a process by which the fairy...

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