Critical & Creative Perspectives on Fairy Tales: An Intertextual Dialogue between Fairy-Tale Scholarship and Postmodern Retellings by Vanessa Joosen (review)

Critical & Creative Perspectives on Fairy Tales contributes substantially to the vibrant field of fairy tale scholarship because of its notable premise and approach, explicating classic fairy tale retellings intertextually with three influential critical works. The premise is that retellings and critical works of the past four decades share similar concerns and that some retellings even “seem motivated by the wish to spread critical ideas to a wider audience, one that specifically includes children” (p. 3). Joosen states her approach early in the introduction: “It is my aim in this book to make a number of such parallels between the two discourses of fiction and scholarship concrete” (p. 2). The organization of the book highlights this choice as Joosen builds chapters around Marcia Lieberman’s “Some Day My Prince Will Come” (College English 34:383–95, 1972), Bruno Bettelheim’s The Uses of Enchantment (Random House, 1976), and Sandra M. Gilbert and Susan Gubar’s analysis of Snow White in The Madwoman in the Attic (Yale University Press, 1979). Through ample references to primary and critical texts, Joosen convincingly demonstrates the proliferations and intersections of retellings and certain types of influential fairy tale scholarship.

The Introduction and chapter 1 establish the relationship of criticism and retellings with traditional tales and the distinctions between creative and critical approaches to fairy tales. Joosen adapts Hans Robert Jauss’s concept of “horizon of expectation” to discuss seven ways that retellings alter traditional fairy tales (pp. 12–6). She also explores how fiction and criticism put forward interpretations with varying status and impact. Retellings tend to reach a wider audience with more latitude in terms of characterization and imagination, but critical works tend to speak with expert authority and try to correspond “to factual reality” (p. 29). To examine the similarities and differences between creative and critical works, she assembles a “corpus of four hundred picture books, short stories, novels, and poems” and focuses on “thematic links with texts from fairy-tale criticism” (p. 7). Joosen allows differences in terms of referentiality, authorship, and audience while also noting blurred boundaries that bring fictionalized dialogue into criticism and paratextual references to critical works into literary texts.

The approach toward intertextuality is nuanced. Rather than following Roland Barthes to consider all texts as intertexts, or a narrower approach that requires intentional connections, Joosen adopts a model by Manfred Pfister that allows for degrees of intertextual density (pp. 18–27). Importantly, she also allows that illustrations can participate in the intertextual dialogue. Her analysis in chapter 3 convincingly shows how illustrations reinforce psychoanalytic readings of Hansel and Gretel and Sleeping Beauty. By using intertextuality rather than influence as a guide, Joosen does not need to prove that a specific critical work influenced a retelling, or vice versa. Rather, she can consider tales and critical works in an intertextual dialogue with, quoting Linda Hutcheon, “perceived overlappings of concern” (p. 3).

These overlappings of concern focus on feminist interpretation and revision of tales and psychoanalytic approaches after Bettelheim. Indicating the conflicted critical reception of Bettelheim, both methodologically and personally (pp. 184–212), Joosen analyzes illustrations and retellings that confirm his views on what Grimm tales offer children therapeutically as well as texts that take Bettelheim and his views to task. Lieberman is associated with pointing out the confining aspects of gender roles as portrayed though reading fairy tales. Joosen reads some texts that confirm Lieberman’s position, particularly by advocating role reversals and active female protagonists. However, she also shares many critical and creative works that grant children, and adults, more perceptive reading skills by evoking other options. Chapter 4 confirms Gilbert and Gubar’s feminist and psychoanalytic reading of Snow White. In masterful acts of interpretation, Joosen works through numerous examples, both illustrations and stories, equating the two characters of...