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

Introduction

Fairy-tale criticism has drawn elaborately on organic metaphors to describe the state of the fairy tale. After the genre was proclaimed dead in Germany after the Second World War, the fairy tale soon rose to life again, as fit as Red Riding Hood when she stepped out of the stomach of the wolf. Guido König remarked in 1975 that “fairy tales can apparently be neither killed nor eradicated” (“Märchen heute” 136; my translation). The tales were to suffer many more blows in the years that followed König’s observation, but for every opponent that stood up, at least as many critics proclaimed their interest in or support for the genre. At the beginning of the twenty-first century, fairy tales are still thriving—not only in their traditional forms but also as the subject of a rich body of fairy-tale retellings and literary criticism. In Why Fairy Tales Stick (2006) and Relentless Progress (2009), Jack Zipes explains the evolution of fairy tales in terms of content, style, function, and address.1 Darwinist and epidemiological analogies underlie the line of reasoning: in order to survive, the genre of the Introduction 2 Introduction fairy tale has adapted itself to the changing environments that it has been confronted with over the centuries. One of the survival strategies that Zipes identifies is the emergence of “hybrid genres” (Stick 3). Referring to the research of, among others, Jean-Michel Adam and Ute Heidmann, Zipes explores how the fairy tale mutates and absorbs certain characteristics of other genres. The structure and style of traditional tales have been adapted in countless processes (e.g., novelization, versification, and picturebook adaptation), and the content of the best-known tales has been transformed in the form of parodies, updates, role reversals, sequels, and prequels . The traditional versions now coexist with an ever-growing corpus of fairy-tale retellings, which, like criticism, help to keep the interest in the old tales vibrant. The hybridity of the fairy-tale retelling exists not only in its obvious connection with the traditional fairy tale but also in its overlaps with fairytale criticism. Several critics have briefly drawn attention to this connection between retellings and criticism, most notably Stephen Benson in Contemporary Fiction and the Fairy Tale (2008): “It is fascinating [ . . . ] to note the extraordinary synchronicity, in the final decades of the twentieth century , of fiction and fairy-tale scholarship. [ . . . ] The concerns of the fiction are variously and fascinatingly close to those of the scholarship” (5). Reconsidering the influence of feminism on the fairy tale in Relentless Progress , Zipes argues that “since 1980 there has been an inextricable, dialectical development of mutual influence of all writers of fairy tales and fairy-tale criticism that has led to innovative fairy-tale experiments in all cultural fields” (122). With the final decades of the twentieth century and the first years of the twenty-first century as my focus, it is my aim in this book to make a number of such parallels between the two discourses of fiction and scholarship concrete. Rather than taking the fairy tale or the fairy-tale retelling as a starting point, as for instance the contributors to Benson’s Contemporary Fiction and the Fairy Tale and Susan Bobby’s Fairy Tales Reimagined (2009) do, I will put three critical texts at the center of my intertextual analyses. The fictional intertexts with which I will link these will not be limited to texts in English, as is the case for many studies of fairy-tale retellings . I will also include a substantial number of Dutch and German retellings. In these languages, fairy-tale retellings for children are more popular than those for adults. That children do not read criticism does not exclude these texts from the intertextual range of fairy-tale scholarship, as I will show. On the contrary, some tales seem motivated by the wish to spread critical ideas to a wider audience, one that specifically includes children . Moreover, the illustrations in children’s books have a critical potential that deserves more attention in relation to fairy-tale criticism and retellings . Finally, I will show that although the synchronicity between the occurrence of some ideas in fiction and scholarship is striking, as Benson convincingly argues, some critical views and assumptions from the 1970s continue to live on in the most recent retellings for children. Rather than examining the influence of criticism on fairy-tale retellings...