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Aimee Bender’s Fiction and the Intertextual Ingestion of Fairy Tales
- Marvels & Tales
- Wayne State University Press
- Volume 26, Number 2, 2012
- pp. 221-239
- 10.1353/mat.2012.a486590
- Article
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If, as Stephen Benson describes them, Angela Carter, Robert Coover, Margaret Atwood, A. S. Byatt, and Salman Rushdie constitute the “fairy-tale generation” prominent at the end of the twentieth century, Aimee Bender may be a leading figure of the next generation. Bender’s contribution to the fairy-tale corpus broadly comprises four categories: acknowledgment of conventional form; intertextual appropriation of common themes and motifs; an exploration of the fairy tale’s paradigm of the family dynamic; and the invention of fresh autonomous tales. Throughout her surrealist fiction Bender incorporates familiar fairy-tale patterns into new stories about the negotiation of loss, disconnection, and fragmentation in a postmodern world.