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

Given the intense, multimedia interest in fairy tales—evident from contemporary television series and films to illustrated books and textile designs—Vanessa Joosen’s Critical and Creative Perspectives on Fairy Tales proves timely and insightful. Today’s renaissance of popular and critical interest in the genre has a broader context, dating to the 1960s, and Joosen organizes her analysis around a few case studies: Marcia K. Lieberman’s 1972 essay “Some Day My Prince Will Come,” Bruno Bettelheim’s commercially successful The Uses of Enchantment (1976), and Sandra M. Gilbert and Susan Gubar’s landmark work of feminist literary criticism, The Madwoman in the Attic (1979). Drawing on an impressive and refreshingly wide range of fairy tale “retellings” in English, German, and Dutch, Joosen shows that these key critical perspectives from the 1970s have powerful echoes in current fairy-tale fiction from the United States, Canada, and Western Europe. These relics of fairy-tale scholarship have, in effect, been canonized and now shape the ways in which a general readership, child and adult, encounters the fairy tale. As anyone who works on and teaches the fairy tale in relation to contemporary critical perspectives knows all too well, these forty-year-old ideas about the genre, its meaning and significance, are culturally entrenched; all of our students are familiar with them in one way or another. They also are at odds with more recent work on the complex social and cultural history of the fairy tale.

As her subtitle suggests, Joosen’s theoretical frame hinges on intertextuality. Through this lens, she studies the dialogic relation of 1970s criticism with more recent children’s literature and adult fiction. In this regard, Critical and Creative Perspectives on Fairy Tales speaks to important recent work on the intertextual, interdiscursive dimensions of fairy tale history, such as Holly Tucker’s Pregnant Fictions: Childbirth and the Fairy Tale in Early Modern France (2003); Marina Balina, Helena Goscilo, and Mark Lipovetsky’s critical anthology of Russian and Soviet tales, Politicizing Magic (2005); and Suzanne Magnanini’s Fairy Tale Science: Monstrous Generation in the Tales of Straparola and Basile (2008). Such studies have inspired radical reassessments of the fairy tale genre, both by exploring connections between tales and other forms of discourse (whether literary, medical, scientific, philosophical, anthropological, or political); reinvigorating well-known tales; or reintegrating fairy-tale texts that had sunk into obscurity.

Joosen does an admirable job of analyzing the “metacritical impulse” in literature (36), demonstrating for example that a Freudian perspective informs Eva Bednářová’s illustration of Charles Perrault’s “Sleeping Beauty” (182–83), and that Jane Yolen’s reworking of the Grimms’ “Snow White”—in her 2000 short story “Snow in Summer”—speaks to the feminist critical perspectives of Gilbert and Gubar (219–22). In her introduction, Joosen provides a valuable accounting of the rise of fairy-tale scholarship in the second half of the twentieth century, and in her conclusion she acknowledges that the critical perspectives that resonate in the various works of fiction she analyzes in detail are largely “outmoded”: “Some of these fictional texts,” she writes, “recapitulate the development of certain lines of thought with regard to the fairy tale, expressing views of the fairy tale that have long been problematized in academic circles” (300). In fact, Joosen could have approached her case studies with a sharper pen, considering not only how the metacritical impulse illuminates certain dimensions of specific texts—which she does brilliantly—but also how it obscures other interpretive possibilities across the literature. What might contemporary fairy-tale fiction look like if it engaged in intertextual dialogue with current criticism? Closer engagement with contemporary scholarship and emergent perspectives in the field of fairy-tale studies—beyond those ideas that have “long been problematized”—would help in this regard.

From the perspective of current scholarship and the critical reassessment of fairy tale history, the foundational categories of this study...