Mixed Magic: Global-Local Dialogues in Fairy Tales for Young Readers by Anna Katrina Gutierrez (review)

In Mixed Magic: Global-Local Dialogues in Fairy Tales for Young Readers, Anna Katrina Gutierrez explores "the ways the global-local exchange of flows affect representations of identity in narratives for children and young adults" (xv). Her study, which consists of an introduction, six chapters, and a conclusion, focuses on fairy tales for young readers, but her ambition is "to formulate an analytical framework that is generalizable to other forms of children's literature" (xviii). More specifically, her aim is to analyze how fairy tales "are adapted according to local patterns of identity and relationships and the meanings that are generated from the transformative negotiation" (xvii). Through the analysis of a selection of fairy tales from different cultural contexts, Gutierrez's study contributes important insights about the relationship between recurring narrative patterns that can be found in fairy tales from different parts of the world and specific fairy tale versions that are tied to their local context. The study also includes an intermedial aspect through comparisons between books and movies as well as a discussion of illustrations in relation to text, thereby illustrating a wide knowledge of the field of fairy tales for young readers.

In the introduction, Gutierrez clarifies that globalization tends to be equaled with a movement from the West to the rest of the world—a monologue where the West is seen as communicating culturally with the rest of the world without being influenced in return—whereas she wants to treat this phenomenon as a dialogue between different parts of the world (xv). For this purpose, she applies the concept of glocalization, which refers to "a negotiation between domains considered global, local, East, or West that enriches realities and counters cultural uniformity" (xv). Thus she wants to demonstrate how a glocal analysis can be utilized in a comparative study that highlights non-Western conceptions of identity and hybridity (xvi). In her method, she combines the concept of glocalization, cognitive narratology, and intertextuality theory. The cognitive approach is used "to establish an understanding of globalization, its cross-cultural exchanges, and outcomes, in terms of a narrative pattern that our minds understand intuitively and recognize as recurring across literary traditions" (xviii). The study does not aim to predict the reader response or the interpretation of actual readers; instead, it focuses on the affordances of the text and clarifies in what ways a specific text can be seen as a result of an interplay between the global and the local (xviii). I regard this as one of the study's strengths since there is a recurrent tendency within cognitive approaches to children's literature to make claims about young readers' interpretations based on textual analysis alone.²

Chapter 1, "Understanding Glocalization and Fairy Tales," introduces the two main theoretical frameworks: glocalization and cognitive narratology. This chapter also defines fairy tales through a thorough discussion of previous research. Whereas the introduction to previous research on globalization and the concept of glocalization is clear, pedagogical, and gives a good foundation for readers of the study who are not intimately familiar with this field, the presentation and application of cognitive narratology is harder to process and understand. Gutierrez does clearly highlight the importance of conceptual blending as an analytical tool to examine how textual elements from a global and a local context interact in specific versions of fairy tales (9). However, while she does establish a distinction between schemas and scripts in this chapter, the distinction is not maintained or explained throughout the analysis chapters. Gutierrez defines schemas as "static frames" that "present standard functions for a certain group"—women, for example (5). Scripts are defined as "concepts that are important for constructing and responding to plots, events, and procedures. … They are composed of interlocking 'slots' or 'terminals' filled with appropriate schemas arranged in a predetermined sequence to address a particular context" (6). Thus schemas together build up a script when they are arranged in a temporal order, according to Gutierrez...