Contemporary Fiction and the Fairy Tale
Publication Year: 2008
Published by: Wayne State University Press
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Contents
Introduction: Fiction and the Contemporaneity of the Fairy Tale
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pp. 1-19
What does it mean to be contemporary? It is in one sense the condition to which we are all tethered: to be together with time. As all good historicist criticism attests, we cannot help but live out our days in the present, however much we may desire to reach outside our moment, to step backward...
1. Penetrating to the Heart of the Bloody Chamber: Angela Carter and the Fairy Tale
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pp. 20-46
Angela Carter was a writer whose dedication to the appropriation, recycling, and combining of often antithetical literary forms led to the formulation of a unique and often inflammatory style, and nowhere is this better illustrated than in The Bloody Chamber, her collection of short stories published in 1979. Of all the books that she produced, this slim collection of...
2. Migrant Fictions: Salman Rushdie and the Fairy Tale
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pp. 47-73
Fairy tales in Salman Rushdie ’s fiction appear in diverse guises. They crop up as decorative extras to gild a witty aside, function as integral elements in convoluted extended metaphors, and even (in a collective form) provide structural models for Rushdie ’s formal experiments with recursive narrative patterns and nonstop tale-telling. Rushdie also seems to have a...
3. “Ancient Forms”: Myth, Fairy Tale, and Narrative in A. S. Byatt’s Fiction
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pp. 74-97
A. S. Byatt’s fiction is shot through with allusions to well-known fairy tales. Hardly a chapter goes by without a prick on the finger, an impenetrable hedge, or an enchanted tower. When her characters aren’t meditating on the significance of fairy tales in their lives, her narrators are commenting...
4. Margaret Atwood and the Fairy Tale: Postmodern Revisioning in Recent Texts
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pp. 98-119
Margaret Atwood is not only one of today’s best-known writers but also one who demonstrates the power and beauty of fairy tales. Fairy-tale intertexts function in nearly all of her work, including novels, short story collections, flash fictions and prose poems, poetry, children’s books, and...
5. The Late Fairy Tales of Robert Coover
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pp. 120-143
Of all those contemporary writers over whom the fairy tale has exerted a significant influence, Robert Coover is perhaps the most consistent. His fairy-tale texts are relatively few in number, yet they stretch across his writing career, beginning in the late 1960s with the story experiments of the...
6. Theorizing Fairy-Tale Fiction, Reading Jeanette Winterson
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pp. 144-177
What theoretical issues arise at the beginning of the twenty-first century from thinking about the use of the fairy tale in postmodern fiction? This is a grand question that, upon examination, could fan out in a variety of different permutations, but one constant is the need to define one ’s terms...
7. Extrapolating from Nalo Hopkinson’s Skin Folk: Reflections on Transformation and Recent English-Language Fairy-Tale Fiction by Women
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pp. 178-204
By 1993 when Angela Carter’s third short-story collection, American Ghosts and Old World Wonders, was published, readers of her short fiction may not have agreed on the liberatory import of her feminism but knew to read her apparent flights of fantasy and “waywardness” as metanarrative...
List of Contributors
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pp. 205-206
Index
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pp. 207-210
Back Cover
E-ISBN-13: 9780814335826
Print-ISBN-13: 9780814332542
Page Count: 216
Publication Year: 2008
Series Title: Series in Fairy-Tale Studies
