Cinderella across Cultures: New Directions and Interdisciplinary Perspectives ed. by Martine Hennard Dutheil de la Rochère, Gillian Lathey, and Monika Woźniak (review)

Cinderella is ubiquitous and seems universal, a fitting synecdoche for the fairy tale itself. That is the role she plays in Cinderella across Cultures, a volume designed to show that every iteration of this "universal" plot is nonetheless the product of "specific historical, geographical, sociocultural, political, economic and material circumstances, as well as discursive, literary, and mediatic ec(h)o-system(s)" (p. 2).

The result of an international conference in Rome in 2012, the volume examines a host of global Cinderellas that dialogue with each other and also diverge from each other in fascinating ways. In the spirit of Revisioning Red Riding Hood around the World (Wayne State University Press, 2013), by Sandra Beckett, a contributor to this volume, Cinderella across Cultures finds examples outside of Western Europe and across media forms. And it does more than introduce the reader to critical approaches in the fashion of a Dundes casebook. Editors Martine Hennard Dutheil de la Rochère, Gillian Lathey, and Monika Woźniak invite the reader to rethink how fairy-tale studies does its work.

As they explain in the introduction, the 18 contributions to the anthology work together to "de-theologize" the default categories (type/ variant, oral/literary) of fairy/folktale studies and instead interrogate stories in "the palimpsestic, transformative, performative, and creative dimension of each retelling" (p. 14). They consider Cinderella's many "deterritorializations" (p. 15) beyond the well-worn path from Basile to Perrault to the Grimms and within webs of local influence and meaning. Essays "decolonize" (p. 16) the fairy tale by finding Cinderella in the form of objects, posters, spectacles, and film; a few are visible in vibrant color inserts.

In three parts, the volume (re)contextualizes, regenders, and visualizes the Cinderella tale in different historical and cultural environments. Sections have lead titles but no introductions, which allows the threads of the disparate essays to remain unbound, a welcome decision in a volume that seeks to undo facile categories. In Part I, "Contextualizing Cinderella," essays retell the history of Charles Perrault's 1697 version of the tale from six perspectives. An explicit goal of the first section is to offer multimedia insights into the French tale to set the stage for the next two de-territorialized sections.

Well suited to its position at the head of the volume, Ruth Bottigheimer's chapter focuses on the earliest versions of the tale. It arcs across four centuries to trace the evolution of Cinderella from a well-defined aristocrat in Basile's "Gata Cenerentola" to what Bottigheimer dubs a "people's princess" (p. 29). Cinderella already shows signs of democratization, becoming a symbol of everywoman in the Grimms, whom Bottigheimer finds "decisive in making her a people's princess" (p. 39). Finally, an "empty vessel" in the late nineteenth century, she was poised to become the icon Disney exploited to tell everywoman's tale, then opened to further interpretation by twentieth-century feminists.

Kathryn Hoffmann's chapter takes a material turn to interpret Cinderella's 1697 glass slipper in the context of the technology, literature, and cultural significance of glass in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. The first part of the article is devoted to a century-long debate about what Perrault meant by verre, while the second is devoted to the special "narrative weight" (p. 57) of the glass slipper, which the tradition privileged above other materialities in the tale. Noting that "Perrault's readers were consumers of crystal and glass" (p. 63), Hoffmann illuminates the symbolic power of the glass slipper in an age of fantastical luxury consumption.

Gillian Lathey looks at the early history of Perrault's tale through its first, "most notable and enduring translation" (p. 90) by Robert Samber in...