Recycling Red Riding Hood (review)

Sandra L. Beckett's Recycling Red Riding Hood is a study of intertextuality in children's literature. Working from her personal collection of "well over two hundred retellings from twenty countries in twelve languages" (xix), and focusing on "the narrative strategies" used by contemporary authors and illustrators to retell "Little Red Riding Hood" for children and young adults (xx), Beckett describes in detail an impressive international array of books that textually or pictorially evoke, reinterpret, recontextualize, and retell "Little Red Riding Hood." For this book, Beckett has limited her study to "retellings of Perrault's and the Grimms' literary tales," specifically, to books published since 1970, which is good because, even within this frame, she works with a dizzyingly rich array of texts, most of which have not been translated into English and are thus, as she explains, generally "unknown in the English-speaking world" (xviii-xix).

Most children in Europe or European-derived cultures know some version of "Little Red Riding Hood," though, as Beckett notes, it is "often a sanitized version that frequently combines elements from both [Perrault's and the Grimms'] tales" (xvii). Thus, as "part of the literary heritage of almost every child in the Western world," "Little Red Riding Hood" allows authors and illustrators of children's books to pursue forms of postmodern aesthetic experimentation that are more often reserved for adult literature (xx). "Contemporary retellings of Little Red Riding Hood," as Beckett initially explains and then illustrates throughout her study, "often use complex narrative structures and techniques, such as polyfocalization, genre blending, metafiction, parody, irony, mise en abyme, fragmentation, gaps, anticlosure, and the carnivalesque" (xx). In the process, authors and illustrators have created a running dialogue about the process of storytelling while recycling the tale to address topics ranging from "contemporary preoccupations" with "technology, ecology, animal rights, physical fitness and well-being, seniors, the physically challenged, and gender issues" to "sexuality and violence" (xx).

Beckett divides her description and analysis into eight chapters ("Reminiscence and Allusion," "Retelling Images," "Fractured Fairy-Tale Games," "Upside Down, Inside Out, and Backwards," "Continuations and Post-LRRH Stories," "Metafictive Play," "Fairy-Tale Salads," and "Expansion"). Her study begins with books that make brief allusions to "Little Red Riding Hood" and then moves toward and concludes with books that are "lengthy expansions" of the tale "in novel form" (xx). For example, in chapter 1, "Reminiscence and Allusion," she explores a wide range of books in which "Little Red Riding Hood" as pre-text "never become[s] entirely transparent and certainly never approach[es] direct citation," but is nonetheless playfully evoked: Philippe Coretin's L'ogre, le loup, la petite fille et le gâteau (1995), Christian Bruel and Didier Jouault's Rouge, bien rouge (1986), Tord Nygen's Den röda tråden (1978), Mitsumasa Anno's Tabi no ehon (1977), Elsa Devernois's Grosse peur pour Bébé Loup (1997), Sharon Jennings's Jeremiah and Mrs. Ming (1990), Fam Ekman's Lommetørkleet (1999), Anthony Browne's The Tunnel (1980), Rascan Nicolas de Crécy's La nuit du grand méchant loup (1998), Hervé Debry's Rock 'n loup (1999), Monique Bermond's Pouchi, Poucha et le gros loup du bois (1976), and Jostein Gaarder's Sofies verden (1991). The book's description and analysis then builds toward its final focus (in chapter 8, "Expansion") on two novel-length treatments of the tale, which, among other things, "deal with the themes of terrorism and freedom" (300): Gillian Cross's Wolf (1990) and Carmen Martín Gaite's Caperucita en Manhattan (1990).

Between the first and last chapters, Beckett, in response to Jack Zipes's call for "a complete reexamination of the illustrations" associated with retellings of "Little Red Riding Hood" (29), analyzes the various ways in which illustrators and author-illustrators (for example, John Goodall, Kelek, Warja Lavater, James Marshall, Beni Montresor, Sarah Moon, O'KIF, Tony Ross, and William Wegman) have visually retold the story using a wide range of media: "oil, watercolour, pencil, ink, charcoal, pastel, crayon, photography, collage...