Critical and Creative Perspectives on Fairy Tales: An Intertextual Dialogue between Fairy-Tale Scholarship and Postmodern Retellings

Notes

introduction 1. See also Jack Zipes’s “The Changing Function of the Fairy Tale” (1988). 2. As Stanley Fish claims, “Interpretation is not the art of construing but the art of constructing. Interpreters do not decode poems; they make them” (327). 3. See, among others, Mieder (Grimms Märchen 7), Solms (90), Haase (“Scholarship ” 31; “American Germanists” 294), and Zipes (“Introduction” xxx). Haase and Zipes refer not only to Germany but also to an international context (among others , the United States, the United Kingdom, Ireland, France, and Italy). 4. See Born (54), Haase (“American Germanists” 295–96; “Scholarship” 1–2), Solms (1), and McGlathery (Romance ix–x). 5. See, among others, Filz’s “Märchen nach 1968” (177) and Zipes’s Fairy Tales and the Art of Subversion. chapter 1 1. Stephens and McCallum use “fairy-tale reversion,” Zipes uses “modern-day revision” and “fairy-tale parody” (“Fairy Tales” 53), Fernández Rodríguez uses “contemporary revision,” Warner uses “reworkings” (193), Sipe and Bacchilega use “fairy-tale transformation,” many critics, including Bacchilega, use “postmodern fairy tale,” Pizer uses “anti–fairy tale,” Nikolajeva uses “fractured fairy tale,” and Beckett uses “recycled fairy tale.” 2. Genette calls this the “hypotext.” Stephens and McCallum define “pre-text” as follows: “The pre-texts for a retelling, then, are known, or already given, ‘stories ,’ however precisely or indeterminately evoked” (5). The analyses in this book are limited to retellings that highlight intertextual links with a specific traditional Notes 308 Notes to c hapter 1 fairy tale rather than with the more general coded discourse of the fairy tale. I will take into account, however, that a traditional fairy tale as pre-text occurs in an array of variants, textual and nontextual, that all share and expand upon a minimal thematic core. Several of these variants may participate in the intertextual process. 3. In contrast to Elizabeth Wanning Harries, who writes that “most retellings of traditional or classic fairy tales are duplicates” (15), I consider retellings a synonym of revisions, and thus distinguish them from duplicates. 4. It can and has been argued that the fairy tales by the French conteuses originally functioned as retellings rather than traditional tales. Indeed my concept of “fairy-tale retellings” corresponds largely to Harries’s definition of “complex fairy tales.” Yet, for the purposes of this study, I will use the concept “traditional tale” in a broader sense than that of those that Harries calls “compact tales” and that she contrasts with “complex tales.” Harries considers the tales by the French conteuses complex fairy tales. Although I am aware that de Beaumont’s “Beauty and the Beast” may at some point have functioned as a retelling, for the purpose of this study, I will consider it a traditional tale. The retellings that are the subject of this book are “more visibly, massively, and explicitly” hypertextual and more openly “grafted” on the traditional tales (Genette, Palimpsests 5, 9) than her “Beauty and the Beast.” Moreover, I will contrast de Beaumont’s tale not with its contemporaries or literary and oral predecessors but with its more recent revisions. 5. See also Smith (10), who distinguishes between explicit and implicit reference to fairy tales in the title. 6. Genette’s term for this type of intertextuality is “hypertextuality” (Palimpsests 5); Nikolajeva calls such works “anagrams,” which she defines as “texts in which we can easily identify the intertext by rearranging the constituent elements or merely by connecting each element to a similar element in another text” (Aesthetic Approaches 37). 7. See also Bacchilega (Postmodern Fairy Tales) and Harries (101). MarieLaure Ryan classifies the fairy tale under “simple narrativity”: “The semantic content of the text is a plot and little else.” This plot “revolves around a single problem ” and “ends when the problem is resolved” (371–72). 8. Exceptions are Pieter Gaudesaboos’s Roodlapje (Little Red Rag) and Sine van Mol’s “Snow White” poems in Een vlekje wolf (A Patch of Wolf). Several retellings include disturbing elements in the happy ending, such as Hofman’s Zwart als inkt (Black as Ink) and Provoost’s De Roos en het Zwijn. All are marketed for children or young adults and were recently published in Dutch. Fewer examples Notes to c hapter 1 309 of retellings that break with the convention of the happy ending for young readers can be found in the English and German titles of my corpus. 9. A complete chapter...