Mapping Fairy-Tale Space: Pastiche and Metafiction in Borderless Tales by Christy Williams (review)

Although the fairy-tale genre is often identified as children's literature, it was generally not aimed at a younger audience until the mid-twentieth century. Its malleable nature, the ability to adapt to different audiences, cultures, and time periods, is a key component to the genre's longevity. Accordingly, Christy Williams suggests that instead of distinguishing between classic fairy tales and modern retellings, it is far more productive to approach fairy tales as an interconnected genre. As Williams points out, "The genre has always been about newness, variation, and retelling" (6). And it is this fundamental and persistent reworking of the genre that is at the center of Mapping Fairy-Tale Space: Pastiche and Metafiction in Borderless Tales—a work that seeks to recognize the increasing intertextuality of fairy tales.

Due to the expansiveness of the fairy-tale world, Williams applies the metaphor of a map to the genre itself, arguing that the fairy-tale genre is its own landscape that operates in two primary ways: internally and externally. Internally, fairy-tale characters, symbols, and motifs are able to move beyond their prescribed narratives. Williams refers to this process as "pastiche" in which "motifs and fragments conjure up ideas about their fairy-tale contexts without necessarily referencing a specific tale" (8). For example, the wicked stepmother character brings to mind certain associations for the reader without the need for a specific story, like "Snow White," to be mentioned (8). The second method occurs externally: through familiarity and cultural osmosis, readers approach—whether consciously or unconsciously—fairy tales for directions, "as relevant to one's lived experienced" (21). Williams explains, "These self-reflexive texts directly engage fairy-tale narratives as models for behavior and elucidate problems with this approach while validating the desire for the fairy tale as a personal map" (21). To illustrate these dual map-like qualities, Williams offers a metafictional analysis of a selection of primary texts, including novels, short stories, and television series. With each text, she observes how twenty-first century audiences are responding to and reshaping the fairy-tale genre for a new era.

These two key observations also form the basis for how the book is structured: two parts, each containing two chapters. Part one ("Mapping Fairy Tales") focuses on texts that utilize pastiche as a way to retell familiar fairy tales in novel ways. Fairy-tale pastiche involves the bringing together of various parts of fairy tales, such as characters and motifs, and creating a new story out of these fragments. Part two ("Fairy-Tale Maps") addresses how fairly-tale characters (and metaphorically readers of fairy tales) encounter problems when they try to apply fairy-tale formulas to modern life—thereby questioning the relevance and purpose of the genre and retelling the tales accordingly. Throughout these two major sections, Williams does not so much establish an explicit thesis that sets out to defend an argument as she presents sets of observations. Like an anthropologist observing a culture, in these four chapters Williams observes the ways in which fairy tales of the twenty-first century continue to do what they have always done: be made new.

The first chapter, "ABC's Once Upon a Time and the Mapping of a Fairy-Tale Land," examines how multiple fairy tales occupy a single landscape in the television series Once Upon a Time. This allows for new possibilities in terms of plot direction and character development, and Williams warrants that the survivability of fairy tales depends on the teller's ability to "make the stories do something new" (62). After establishing this central tenet, the second chapter, "Serialization and Hybridity in Marissa Meyer's The Lunar Chronicles and Seanan McGuire's Indexing," demonstrates how fairy-tale pastiche can take different forms in serial novels. In Meyer's series, each book centers on an individual fairy tale, a technique that Williams terms "closed borders" due to their singular focus on one fairy-tale narrative. Conversely, McGuire's series takes a...