Cristina Bacchilega | University of Hawaii at Manoa (original) (raw)

Papers by Cristina Bacchilega

˜The œAmerican historical review, Jun 1, 2024

Modern Fiction Studies, 2004

Journal of American Folklore, 2009

Ka mo‘olelo o Hi‘iakaikapoliopele: ka wahine i ka hikina a ka lā, ka u‘i palekoki uila o Halema‘u... more Ka mo‘olelo o Hi‘iakaikapoliopele: ka wahine i ka hikina a ka lā, ka u‘i palekoki uila o Halema‘uma‘u (The Epic Tale of Hi‘iakaika­ poliopele: Woman of the Sunrise, Lightning­ skir ted Beauty of Halema‘uma‘u). By Ho‘oulumā‘hiehie. Ed. and trans. Puakea Nogelmeier. Illus. by Solomon Enos. 2 vols. (Honolulu: Awaiaulu Press, 2006. Vol. 1, pp. 522. Vol. 2, pp. 490. Commentary on text and art, illustrations, indexes.)

Fabula, 1988

The Gase of the Märchen * Fairy-tales "are historical prescriptions, internalized, potent, explos... more The Gase of the Märchen * Fairy-tales "are historical prescriptions, internalized, potent, explosive, and we acknowledge the power they hold over our lives by mystifying them" r. _. JackZipes A colleague reads my essay on postmodern revisions of Snow White (AaTh 709) and asks: "Are you officiating over the funeral rites of a genre which, lifted out of the nexus of oral circulation, gets caught up in the self-reflexive-intertextual-structurations of postmodernism?" "Am I?" I ask myself. A TV commercial reminds me that "Once upon a time, it was easy to be a consumer .. .* I wake up to the merry, carefree voice of Goldilocks on the radio: her gold bank card has allowed her to pay off the bears' hospitality. In an interview, Margaret Atwood states that folk and fairy tales are, like biblical stories and Greek myths, the foundations of the Western Imagination; hasn't Robert Coover said that too? And what about John Barth? The magazine Heavy Metal features the grotesque tale of "Snow Whitish (she's a little off-color 'cause she's got a cold).* Italo Calvino's posthumous, incomplete, and untranslated collection on the five senses has us overhearing a fairy tale king's hearing problems ... On the box of a Japanese product which soothes minor pain and itch, Snow White bends over her little friends protectively, a good mother with the best lotion at hand. Stephen Sondheim and James Lapine's musical "Into the Woods," an amusing and fearless contemporary look at fairy tales, is quite a success in New York City. Angela Carter's revision of Perrault's fairy tales sells well in England: L•! contes du temps passe become, äs the title of her collection indicates, a contemporary Bloody Cbamber where we lie "In the Company of Wolves." Earlier versions of this essay were presented at the 1987 American Folklore Society meeting in Albuquerque, N. Mex. and at the 1987 Modern Languages Association convention in San Francisco, Calif.

Moderator Cristina Bacchilega introduces the panelists on the Translation(s) panel. Translation(s... more Moderator Cristina Bacchilega introduces the panelists on the Translation(s) panel. Translation(s): This panel discusses the impact of translation on the conceptualization and circulation of literatures and oratures in the world, historically and in the present. Questions shaping this discussion include: How are the challenges and benefits of translating literatures of the world into English different from translating Samoan literature into Hawaiian or Arabic into Turkish? How has translation done violence to the people and literatures of colonized nations and how does it contribute to decolonization and cultural revitalization? Should everyday, oral translation practices all over the world impact our understanding of the value of translation as a social and literary process? How can translation practices contribute to resisting a globalizing pedagogy of "world literature"? Moderator: Cristina Bacchilega Panelists: Ngũgĩ wa Thiong'o, Yung-Hee Kim, Bryan Kuwada, S. Shanka

Western Folklore, 1993

... 1987. Technologies of Gender: Essays on Theory, Film, and Fiction. ... 1981. Emergingfrom the... more ... 1987. Technologies of Gender: Essays on Theory, Film, and Fiction. ... 1981. Emergingfrom the Chrysalis: Studies in Rituals of Women's Initiation. ... 1986. To Spin a Yarn: The Female Voice in Folklore and Fairy Tale. In Fairy Tales and Society, ed. Ruth B. Bottigheimer, pp. 53-74. ...

Contemporary Women's Writing, Sep 3, 2021

Amsterdam University Press eBooks, Aug 30, 2023

Journal of the Fantastic in the Arts, 2017

Among genres of the fantastic, fairy tales are set apart in their traditional and most popular ve... more Among genres of the fantastic, fairy tales are set apart in their traditional and most popular versions by the hope they seek to elicit through magical transformations and expectation of happy endings. Their success testi es to their paradoxical functions as pathways showing the route to a ready-made adult life but also imaginative solutions to problems experienced by those who are small, vulnerable, or di erent. The proliferation of adaptations in the contemporary fairytale web signals the need to revitalize ctions in danger of losing their appeal as generators of hope. We consider two fairy-tale adaptationsa graphic novel and a feature lm-and their wondrous reanimating strategies, speci cally revitalizing the genre's crossover appeal and recognizing relations across di erences. Our approach recognizes that fairy tales can open up possibilities for being and acting in the world that are not con ned to socially sanctioned paths.

Penguin eBooks, 2019

Dive into centuries of mermaid lore with these captivating tales from around the world. A Penguin... more Dive into centuries of mermaid lore with these captivating tales from around the world. A Penguin Classic Among the oldest and most popular mythical beings, mermaids and other merfolk have captured the imagination since long before Ariel sold her voice to a sea witch in the beloved Disney film adaptation of Hans Christian Andersen's "The Little Mermaid." As far back as the eighth century B.C., sailors in Homer's Odyssey stuffed wax in their ears to resist the Sirens, who lured men to their watery deaths with song. More than two thousand years later, the gullible New York public lined up to witness a mummified "mermaid" specimen that the enterprising showman P. T. Barnum swore was real. The Penguin Book of Mermaids is a treasury of such tales about merfolk and water spirits from different cultures, ranging from Scottish selkies to Hindu water-serpents to Chilean sea fairies. A third of the selections are published here in English for the first time, and all are accompanied by commentary that explores their undercurrents, showing us how public perceptions of this popular mythical hybrid--at once a human and a fish--illuminate issues of gender, spirituality, ecology, and sexuality.

Western Folklore, Oct 1, 2004

Folktales of Northern India. Edited by Sadhana Naithani. (Santa Barbara: ABC-CLIO, 2002. Pp. 1 + ... more Folktales of Northern India. Edited by Sadhana Naithani. (Santa Barbara: ABC-CLIO, 2002. Pp. 1 + 426, introduction, acknowledgments, notes, index. $45.00 cloth; Indian Ocean Folktales: Madagascar, Comoros, Mauritius, Reunion, Seychelles. Edited by Lee Haring. (Chennai, India: National Folklore Support Centre, 2002. Pp. 146, preface, introduction, maps, illustrations, notes, bibliography. Rs. 200 paper) Folktales of Northern India is part of ABC-Clio's "Classic Folk and Fairy Tales" series, edited by Jack Zipes. Reprinting unaltered folk and fairytale texts, the series seeks to contextualize the work of nineteenth-and early twentieth-century collectors through historical framing and consideration of "methodology and translation practices." By contrast, Indian Ocean Folktales is the product of a "non-profit organization, registered in Chennai," supported by the Ford Foundation, and devoted to promoting networking and research on Indian folklore as well as to "integrat[ing] scholarship with activism [. . .], comparative folklore studies with cultural diversities and identities [...], [and] folklore fieldwork with developmental issues and folklore advocacy with public programming events." While vastly different in purpose and audience, these two important books share an understanding that "[c]olonialism linked globally not only trade, but also cultures and knowledge" (Naithani xlvi). Within the context of colonial power relations-both their inequities and their temporary intimacies-editor Sadhana Naithani introduces us to the British folklorist William Crooke and his collaborator, Pandit Râm Gharib Chaube. Crooke, a civil servant who spent twenty-five years in northern India, founding and editing an ethnographic journal, North Indian Notes and Queries (NINQ), became recognized in the United Kingdom as an authority and upon his return received an honorary Oxford doctorate and was elected president of the Folk-Lore Society (xli). Little has been known of Chaube, who received occasional mention in NINQ Here, Naithani's research shows the extent of his role. It seems Chaube was the scholar, linguist, and translator who enabled Crooke to collect folktales and print them regularly in NINQ for in the manuscripts "all the information regarding the tellers, the folktale texts, and the comments are in the handwriting of Pandit Râm Gharib Chaube" (xxxiv-xxxv). Thanks to Naithani, we now see Chaube as a scholar, and we are invited to reflect on the limitations that colonialism imposed upon his intense collaboration-never a relationship of equal exchange or recognition-with Crooke. In the present volume are 363 tales from NINQ (1892-1896) and from the later Indian Antiquary (1924-1926), organized chronologically as they appeared in these journals. For each tale, Naithani reproduces the original information about teller and place. Some tales are framed by comments and comparative notes (these should not be taken uncritically as authoritative); some are summarized while others are told in full and introduced by the once upon a time formula; in some cases the name of the person who provided the initial or literal translation is provided along with the name of the teller. The index helps identify recurring themes, characters, and objects, but there is no apparatus for motifs or tale types. Lee Haring, in his clear and focused introduction to Indian Ocean Folktales, tells us that the island groupings Madagascar, Comoros, Mauritius, Reunion, and Seychelles were uninhabited before the colonial period, but that subsequently, "through colonization, slavery, and indentured labour, they acquired some of the most mixed populations in the world" (2). The Indian population is particularly diverse-hence the interest of the National Folklore Support Centre in this publication-and their ancestors include Keralites from the Malabar Coast, Muslims from Gujarat, Tamils from Pondichery. …

Journal of Folklore Research Reviews, Aug 2, 2007

Reviewed Medium: book Authors: Giuseppe Gatto Year: 2006 Pages: 230 Publisher: LED Edizioni Unive... more Reviewed Medium: book Authors: Giuseppe Gatto Year: 2006 Pages: 230 Publisher: LED Edizioni Universitarie di Lettere Economia Diritto ISBN: 88-7916-314-0 (hard cover). Prices: 18,50 Euros(hard cover).

Narrative culture, 2015

As Thomas King afffirmed in his 2003 Massey Lectures, "the truth about stories is that that&... more As Thomas King afffirmed in his 2003 Massey Lectures, "the truth about stories is that that's all we are" (2). This is why I am genuinely excited about this new journal, Narrative Culture, and find myself responding somewhat foolheartedly to its editors' call for an opinion piece.1 What is the scope of narrative culture? What are some of the challenges and opportunities the framework of narrative culture poses to specific disciplines? What in this framework can the place of folk narratives and folk-narrative scholars be? The stories about stories I tell here in answer to these questions can only be informed by the stories-experiential, historical, imaginative, place-based, and scholarly-I know. The stories about stories I hope to read in Narrative Culture would move us to engage with "narrative cultures" in the plural as situated and interrelated practices where knowledges, desires, and conflicts are negotiated within and across worldly storytelling networks.As the editors' "Introduction" in the first issue suggests, narrative culture invites interdisciplinary approaches to all kinds of narratives circulating in and adapted to a wide range of contexts and media: "By widening the scope from narrative to narrative culture, we acknowledge that narrative informs and reigns supreme in a large variety of cultural phenomena" and that narrative culture encompasses more "than, for instance, folk narrative, oral literature, popular narrating, or narratology" (Marzolph and Bendix 1). Significantly, the editors also remark on wanting "to foster exchange and learning across boundaries of learning," boundaries that are not simply disciplinary, but rather result from economic as well as geopolitical imbalances. Knowing that location has a strong impact on scholarship as narrative culture, the editors "seek to honor . . . the diffferent points of departure taken for granted or simply available to scholars in diffferent locations" (Marzolph and Bendix 6).From my own location, I take the journal's offfering of a scholarly forum for narrative culture across disciplines and media as well as sociohistorical boundaries to deploy culture, a much-contested term, in specific ways. Narrative culture is a set of practices concerned with the production, exchange, and consumption of shared meanings-narratives, in this case-that depend on the work of representation and circulate in competition with one another.2 One of the challenges, then, of contributing to the study of narrative culture is to construct and engage scholarly tales that decode not only the workings of narrative texts as discourse and story, recit and histoire, in relation to one another and as performances to their storytelling contexts, but also the workings of power and knowledge that permeate the representational, conceptual, and material practices and efffects of these narrative texts.While this is a specialized and relatively recent understanding of culture,3 it informs a widening range of approaches to narrative, and it helps to clarify how weighty King's claim actually is. The first Massey lecturer of Native descent, Cherokee fiction writer and theorist King tells stories about family, literature, and history as well as a creation story about Charm, a woman who fell from the sky (10-21). In retelling this Earth-Diver creation story, King highlights its principles of curiosity, balance, and cooperation. He comments on how such a story is entertaining but easily forgotten in North America where the legacy of "Genesis" dominates (21). Then he asks, "What kind of a world might we have created with that kind of story?" (28). Because we live by stories and in stories, he challenges his audience to take action: "Take Charm's story, for instance. It's yours. Do with it what you will. Tell it to friends. Turn it into a television movie. Forget it. But don't say in the years to come you would have lived your life diffferently if only you had heard this story" (29). Stories construct our worlds and us at the same time, emerging from actual negotiations with and in these worlds. …

˜The œAmerican historical review, Jun 1, 2024

Modern Fiction Studies, 2004

Journal of American Folklore, 2009

Ka mo‘olelo o Hi‘iakaikapoliopele: ka wahine i ka hikina a ka lā, ka u‘i palekoki uila o Halema‘u... more Ka mo‘olelo o Hi‘iakaikapoliopele: ka wahine i ka hikina a ka lā, ka u‘i palekoki uila o Halema‘uma‘u (The Epic Tale of Hi‘iakaika­ poliopele: Woman of the Sunrise, Lightning­ skir ted Beauty of Halema‘uma‘u). By Ho‘oulumā‘hiehie. Ed. and trans. Puakea Nogelmeier. Illus. by Solomon Enos. 2 vols. (Honolulu: Awaiaulu Press, 2006. Vol. 1, pp. 522. Vol. 2, pp. 490. Commentary on text and art, illustrations, indexes.)

Fabula, 1988

The Gase of the Märchen * Fairy-tales "are historical prescriptions, internalized, potent, explos... more The Gase of the Märchen * Fairy-tales "are historical prescriptions, internalized, potent, explosive, and we acknowledge the power they hold over our lives by mystifying them" r. _. JackZipes A colleague reads my essay on postmodern revisions of Snow White (AaTh 709) and asks: "Are you officiating over the funeral rites of a genre which, lifted out of the nexus of oral circulation, gets caught up in the self-reflexive-intertextual-structurations of postmodernism?" "Am I?" I ask myself. A TV commercial reminds me that "Once upon a time, it was easy to be a consumer .. .* I wake up to the merry, carefree voice of Goldilocks on the radio: her gold bank card has allowed her to pay off the bears' hospitality. In an interview, Margaret Atwood states that folk and fairy tales are, like biblical stories and Greek myths, the foundations of the Western Imagination; hasn't Robert Coover said that too? And what about John Barth? The magazine Heavy Metal features the grotesque tale of "Snow Whitish (she's a little off-color 'cause she's got a cold).* Italo Calvino's posthumous, incomplete, and untranslated collection on the five senses has us overhearing a fairy tale king's hearing problems ... On the box of a Japanese product which soothes minor pain and itch, Snow White bends over her little friends protectively, a good mother with the best lotion at hand. Stephen Sondheim and James Lapine's musical "Into the Woods," an amusing and fearless contemporary look at fairy tales, is quite a success in New York City. Angela Carter's revision of Perrault's fairy tales sells well in England: L•! contes du temps passe become, äs the title of her collection indicates, a contemporary Bloody Cbamber where we lie "In the Company of Wolves." Earlier versions of this essay were presented at the 1987 American Folklore Society meeting in Albuquerque, N. Mex. and at the 1987 Modern Languages Association convention in San Francisco, Calif.

Moderator Cristina Bacchilega introduces the panelists on the Translation(s) panel. Translation(s... more Moderator Cristina Bacchilega introduces the panelists on the Translation(s) panel. Translation(s): This panel discusses the impact of translation on the conceptualization and circulation of literatures and oratures in the world, historically and in the present. Questions shaping this discussion include: How are the challenges and benefits of translating literatures of the world into English different from translating Samoan literature into Hawaiian or Arabic into Turkish? How has translation done violence to the people and literatures of colonized nations and how does it contribute to decolonization and cultural revitalization? Should everyday, oral translation practices all over the world impact our understanding of the value of translation as a social and literary process? How can translation practices contribute to resisting a globalizing pedagogy of "world literature"? Moderator: Cristina Bacchilega Panelists: Ngũgĩ wa Thiong'o, Yung-Hee Kim, Bryan Kuwada, S. Shanka

Western Folklore, 1993

... 1987. Technologies of Gender: Essays on Theory, Film, and Fiction. ... 1981. Emergingfrom the... more ... 1987. Technologies of Gender: Essays on Theory, Film, and Fiction. ... 1981. Emergingfrom the Chrysalis: Studies in Rituals of Women's Initiation. ... 1986. To Spin a Yarn: The Female Voice in Folklore and Fairy Tale. In Fairy Tales and Society, ed. Ruth B. Bottigheimer, pp. 53-74. ...

Contemporary Women's Writing, Sep 3, 2021

Amsterdam University Press eBooks, Aug 30, 2023

Journal of the Fantastic in the Arts, 2017

Among genres of the fantastic, fairy tales are set apart in their traditional and most popular ve... more Among genres of the fantastic, fairy tales are set apart in their traditional and most popular versions by the hope they seek to elicit through magical transformations and expectation of happy endings. Their success testi es to their paradoxical functions as pathways showing the route to a ready-made adult life but also imaginative solutions to problems experienced by those who are small, vulnerable, or di erent. The proliferation of adaptations in the contemporary fairytale web signals the need to revitalize ctions in danger of losing their appeal as generators of hope. We consider two fairy-tale adaptationsa graphic novel and a feature lm-and their wondrous reanimating strategies, speci cally revitalizing the genre's crossover appeal and recognizing relations across di erences. Our approach recognizes that fairy tales can open up possibilities for being and acting in the world that are not con ned to socially sanctioned paths.

Penguin eBooks, 2019

Dive into centuries of mermaid lore with these captivating tales from around the world. A Penguin... more Dive into centuries of mermaid lore with these captivating tales from around the world. A Penguin Classic Among the oldest and most popular mythical beings, mermaids and other merfolk have captured the imagination since long before Ariel sold her voice to a sea witch in the beloved Disney film adaptation of Hans Christian Andersen's "The Little Mermaid." As far back as the eighth century B.C., sailors in Homer's Odyssey stuffed wax in their ears to resist the Sirens, who lured men to their watery deaths with song. More than two thousand years later, the gullible New York public lined up to witness a mummified "mermaid" specimen that the enterprising showman P. T. Barnum swore was real. The Penguin Book of Mermaids is a treasury of such tales about merfolk and water spirits from different cultures, ranging from Scottish selkies to Hindu water-serpents to Chilean sea fairies. A third of the selections are published here in English for the first time, and all are accompanied by commentary that explores their undercurrents, showing us how public perceptions of this popular mythical hybrid--at once a human and a fish--illuminate issues of gender, spirituality, ecology, and sexuality.

Western Folklore, Oct 1, 2004

Folktales of Northern India. Edited by Sadhana Naithani. (Santa Barbara: ABC-CLIO, 2002. Pp. 1 + ... more Folktales of Northern India. Edited by Sadhana Naithani. (Santa Barbara: ABC-CLIO, 2002. Pp. 1 + 426, introduction, acknowledgments, notes, index. $45.00 cloth; Indian Ocean Folktales: Madagascar, Comoros, Mauritius, Reunion, Seychelles. Edited by Lee Haring. (Chennai, India: National Folklore Support Centre, 2002. Pp. 146, preface, introduction, maps, illustrations, notes, bibliography. Rs. 200 paper) Folktales of Northern India is part of ABC-Clio's "Classic Folk and Fairy Tales" series, edited by Jack Zipes. Reprinting unaltered folk and fairytale texts, the series seeks to contextualize the work of nineteenth-and early twentieth-century collectors through historical framing and consideration of "methodology and translation practices." By contrast, Indian Ocean Folktales is the product of a "non-profit organization, registered in Chennai," supported by the Ford Foundation, and devoted to promoting networking and research on Indian folklore as well as to "integrat[ing] scholarship with activism [. . .], comparative folklore studies with cultural diversities and identities [...], [and] folklore fieldwork with developmental issues and folklore advocacy with public programming events." While vastly different in purpose and audience, these two important books share an understanding that "[c]olonialism linked globally not only trade, but also cultures and knowledge" (Naithani xlvi). Within the context of colonial power relations-both their inequities and their temporary intimacies-editor Sadhana Naithani introduces us to the British folklorist William Crooke and his collaborator, Pandit Râm Gharib Chaube. Crooke, a civil servant who spent twenty-five years in northern India, founding and editing an ethnographic journal, North Indian Notes and Queries (NINQ), became recognized in the United Kingdom as an authority and upon his return received an honorary Oxford doctorate and was elected president of the Folk-Lore Society (xli). Little has been known of Chaube, who received occasional mention in NINQ Here, Naithani's research shows the extent of his role. It seems Chaube was the scholar, linguist, and translator who enabled Crooke to collect folktales and print them regularly in NINQ for in the manuscripts "all the information regarding the tellers, the folktale texts, and the comments are in the handwriting of Pandit Râm Gharib Chaube" (xxxiv-xxxv). Thanks to Naithani, we now see Chaube as a scholar, and we are invited to reflect on the limitations that colonialism imposed upon his intense collaboration-never a relationship of equal exchange or recognition-with Crooke. In the present volume are 363 tales from NINQ (1892-1896) and from the later Indian Antiquary (1924-1926), organized chronologically as they appeared in these journals. For each tale, Naithani reproduces the original information about teller and place. Some tales are framed by comments and comparative notes (these should not be taken uncritically as authoritative); some are summarized while others are told in full and introduced by the once upon a time formula; in some cases the name of the person who provided the initial or literal translation is provided along with the name of the teller. The index helps identify recurring themes, characters, and objects, but there is no apparatus for motifs or tale types. Lee Haring, in his clear and focused introduction to Indian Ocean Folktales, tells us that the island groupings Madagascar, Comoros, Mauritius, Reunion, and Seychelles were uninhabited before the colonial period, but that subsequently, "through colonization, slavery, and indentured labour, they acquired some of the most mixed populations in the world" (2). The Indian population is particularly diverse-hence the interest of the National Folklore Support Centre in this publication-and their ancestors include Keralites from the Malabar Coast, Muslims from Gujarat, Tamils from Pondichery. …

Journal of Folklore Research Reviews, Aug 2, 2007

Reviewed Medium: book Authors: Giuseppe Gatto Year: 2006 Pages: 230 Publisher: LED Edizioni Unive... more Reviewed Medium: book Authors: Giuseppe Gatto Year: 2006 Pages: 230 Publisher: LED Edizioni Universitarie di Lettere Economia Diritto ISBN: 88-7916-314-0 (hard cover). Prices: 18,50 Euros(hard cover).

Narrative culture, 2015

As Thomas King afffirmed in his 2003 Massey Lectures, "the truth about stories is that that&... more As Thomas King afffirmed in his 2003 Massey Lectures, "the truth about stories is that that's all we are" (2). This is why I am genuinely excited about this new journal, Narrative Culture, and find myself responding somewhat foolheartedly to its editors' call for an opinion piece.1 What is the scope of narrative culture? What are some of the challenges and opportunities the framework of narrative culture poses to specific disciplines? What in this framework can the place of folk narratives and folk-narrative scholars be? The stories about stories I tell here in answer to these questions can only be informed by the stories-experiential, historical, imaginative, place-based, and scholarly-I know. The stories about stories I hope to read in Narrative Culture would move us to engage with "narrative cultures" in the plural as situated and interrelated practices where knowledges, desires, and conflicts are negotiated within and across worldly storytelling networks.As the editors' "Introduction" in the first issue suggests, narrative culture invites interdisciplinary approaches to all kinds of narratives circulating in and adapted to a wide range of contexts and media: "By widening the scope from narrative to narrative culture, we acknowledge that narrative informs and reigns supreme in a large variety of cultural phenomena" and that narrative culture encompasses more "than, for instance, folk narrative, oral literature, popular narrating, or narratology" (Marzolph and Bendix 1). Significantly, the editors also remark on wanting "to foster exchange and learning across boundaries of learning," boundaries that are not simply disciplinary, but rather result from economic as well as geopolitical imbalances. Knowing that location has a strong impact on scholarship as narrative culture, the editors "seek to honor . . . the diffferent points of departure taken for granted or simply available to scholars in diffferent locations" (Marzolph and Bendix 6).From my own location, I take the journal's offfering of a scholarly forum for narrative culture across disciplines and media as well as sociohistorical boundaries to deploy culture, a much-contested term, in specific ways. Narrative culture is a set of practices concerned with the production, exchange, and consumption of shared meanings-narratives, in this case-that depend on the work of representation and circulate in competition with one another.2 One of the challenges, then, of contributing to the study of narrative culture is to construct and engage scholarly tales that decode not only the workings of narrative texts as discourse and story, recit and histoire, in relation to one another and as performances to their storytelling contexts, but also the workings of power and knowledge that permeate the representational, conceptual, and material practices and efffects of these narrative texts.While this is a specialized and relatively recent understanding of culture,3 it informs a widening range of approaches to narrative, and it helps to clarify how weighty King's claim actually is. The first Massey lecturer of Native descent, Cherokee fiction writer and theorist King tells stories about family, literature, and history as well as a creation story about Charm, a woman who fell from the sky (10-21). In retelling this Earth-Diver creation story, King highlights its principles of curiosity, balance, and cooperation. He comments on how such a story is entertaining but easily forgotten in North America where the legacy of "Genesis" dominates (21). Then he asks, "What kind of a world might we have created with that kind of story?" (28). Because we live by stories and in stories, he challenges his audience to take action: "Take Charm's story, for instance. It's yours. Do with it what you will. Tell it to friends. Turn it into a television movie. Forget it. But don't say in the years to come you would have lived your life diffferently if only you had heard this story" (29). Stories construct our worlds and us at the same time, emerging from actual negotiations with and in these worlds. …

Journal of American Folklore, Jan 1, 2009

Mfs Modern Fiction Studies, Jan 1, 2004

Sharon R. Wilson's 1993 book, Margaret Atwood's Fairy-Tale Sexual Politics, is an extre... more Sharon R. Wilson's 1993 book, Margaret Atwood's Fairy-Tale Sexual Politics, is an extremely well-researched and comprehensive examination of Atwood's engagement as a writer, visual artist, and feminist with the genre of the fairy tale. Wilson has now edited a collection of ...

In these two precious volumes, Carl Lindahl, Martha Gano Houston Research Professor of English at... more In these two precious volumes, Carl Lindahl, Martha Gano Houston Research Professor of English at the University of Houston, presents 215 tales transcribed from sound recordings in the American Folklife Center and the Archive of Folk Culture of the Library of Congress. Each story in ...

Journal of American Folklore, Jan 1, 2007

In eighteenth-century France, it was not a question of the chicken or the egg but of the egg or t... more In eighteenth-century France, it was not a question of the chicken or the egg but of the egg or the "animalcule." Both "ovism" and "animalculism" were "preformationist" embryological theories—imagining preformed humans in the egg or the sperm—but they ascribed ...

The key to the success of this new index in setting the user on a “trail of [ . . .] meanings” is... more The key to the success of this new index in setting the user on a “trail of [ . . .] meanings” is the extensive use of cross references. The difficulty of basing a typology on actants, that “[m]ultiple agents perform a single func-tion,” as Wayland Hand observed, is considerably mitigated ...

Nancy Canepa has provided English-language scholars with an excellent and multidimensional study ... more Nancy Canepa has provided English-language scholars with an excellent and multidimensional study of Giambattista Basile's wonderful seventeenth-century [End Page 300] collection of tales, Lo cunto de li cunti overo Lo trattenemiento de peccerille (The Tale of Tales, or ...

WESTERN FOLKLORE, Jan 1, 2007

… Literature Association Quarterly, Jan 1, 2010

Fairy Tales: A New History is not even that new. Bottigheimer's argument, synthesize... more Fairy Tales: A New History is not even that new. Bottigheimer's argument, synthesized in a New York Times article as "the accepted oral tradition of fairy tales is a fairy tale," is definitely well known to scholars of folklore and fairy tales who have read her 2002 book, The Fairy ...

International Labor and Working-Class History, 2006

Reviewed Medium: book Authors: Negro del and Giovanna P. Year: 2004 Pages: 183 Publisher: McGill-... more Reviewed Medium: book Authors: Negro del and Giovanna P. Year: 2004 Pages: 183 Publisher: McGill-Queen's University Press ISBN: 0-7735-2739-7 Prices: $24.95 US

Bookbird: A Journal of International Children's Literature, 2015

Western Folklore, 2007

Fairy Godfather: Straparola, Venice and the Fairy Tale Tradition. By Ruth B. Bottigheimer. (Phila... more Fairy Godfather: Straparola, Venice and the Fairy Tale Tradition. By Ruth B. Bottigheimer. (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2002. Pp. viii + 156, introduction, map, photograph, illustrations, notes, bibliography, index. $39.95 cloth) This book addresses the contribution that Giovanfrancesco Straparola's two-volume Le piacevoli notti (Pleasant Nights) made to the emergence of the fairy tale as a literary genre. Because this work was a bestseller, with twenty editions appearing between 1551 and 1608 in Venice alone, and there are strong intertextual ties between Straparola's tales and those by Giovanbattista Basile, Charles Perrault, Madame de Murat, and Madame d'Aulnoy, Bottigheimer's endeavor has great potential. Before the publication of Jack Zipes' The Great Fairy Tale Tradition: From Straparola and Basile to the Brothers Grimm (2001), English-language students of fairy tales would not have been much aware of Straparola and others who have played a relatively minor role in the canon of "classic fairy tales" as constructed in North American scholarship. So examining Straparola's contribution to the European tradition of fairy tales could be seen as participating in the larger project of retracing the history and rethinking the social value of the genre, which in the English language alone has benefited from the work of scholars such as Nancy Canepa, Donald Haase, Elizabeth Harries, Lewis Seifert, Jennifer Schacker, Holly Tucker, Marina Warner, Jan M. Ziolkowski, and Jack Zipes, However, because the present work defines Straparola's significance as a fairy-tale writer in ways both narrow and excessive, Ruth Bottigheimer's Fairy Godfather does justice neither to Straparola nor to fairy-tale studies. Straparola's collection comprises 73 tales of many kinds within a Decameron-inspired narrative frame. The present work focuses on a dozen tales of magic, dividing them into "restoration tales" (the high social status of the protagonist is put into jeopardy but is restored through magic), and "rise tales" (the poor hero gains social status thanks to magic). According to Bottigheimer, "[i]t was Straparola's great and lasting contribution to the European literary heritage to have invented rise tales" (2). The first two chapters of Fairy Godfather are devoted to supporting and augmenting this claim-not only that Straparola "invented rise tales" but that "his newly invented tales were the first to address the aspirations of an urban artisanal readership" (2). The opening chapters distinguish between the two plots, highlight the role of magic in rise tales and, by referencing historical information about sixteenth-century Venice's economy and social order, suggest a strictly compensatory role for rise tales. Bottigheimer's assertion that Straparola invented rise tales is not new (Bottigheimer 1994) and it rests on still earlier theories (Wesselski 1931,1942). In restating this claim, however, Bottigheimer seems oblivious to developments in genre studies and in folklore studies as well as to the interdisciplinary conversation made possible of late by the institutionalization of fairy-tale studies. Rather, her work is informed by the underlying position implicit in this book-that there were no oral sources to Straparola's rise tales-and has more recently been supplemented by her generalization that "print processes and print culture are central to the creation and the dissemination of European fairy tales" (Bottigheimer 2006). I doubt anyone disagrees that print has played a major role in the circulation of fairy tales, but when it comes to discarding oral tradition's role in the emergence and appeal of the genre, I am not the only one to object (Carminati 2004, Vas da Suva 2007, Ziolkowski 2007). There are problems inherent in Bottigheimer's claims. First, if Straparola's is the oldest print version of the rise plot, this hardly makes him its inventor, but only shows he was the first to print one. second, while the documentation of nineteenth-century oral rise tales in Europe cannot prove that such tales circulated orally in earlier periods, their vitality and diversity suggests that Straparola may have played the role rather of a "writer-narrator" ("scrittore-narratore" Mugnaini 2004:276) than of an inventor. …

Journal of American History

Review(s) of: The power of the steel-tipped pen: Reconstructing native Hawaiian intellectual hist... more Review(s) of: The power of the steel-tipped pen: Reconstructing native Hawaiian intellectual history, by Silva, Noenoe K, Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2017, 288 pp., biblio., glossary, illus., index, notes, US$25.95 (softcover).

Contemporary Women's Writing, 2021

Marvels & Tales, 2008

and the Cricket. In the case of type 155, The Ungrateful Serpent Returned to Captivity, the old l... more and the Cricket. In the case of type 155, The Ungrateful Serpent Returned to Captivity, the old literary fable consists of only the first part of the story and ends unhappily, while most of the modern versions include some additional events and end, usually, with a happy ending. A work by the sixteenth-century dramatist G. Vicente has as one of its episodes type 1479*, The Old Maid on the Roof. A collection of moralistic tales by G. F. Trancoso (also sixteenth century) includes, for example, type 873, The King Discovers His Unknown Son; type 887, Griselda; and type 1454*, The Greedy Fiancée, as well as types classified as magic tales, types 505, The Grateful Dead, and type 516C, Amicus and Amelius, and type 707, The Three Golden Children. The prolonged development of the international scope of The Types of the Folktale (FFC 74, 1928; FFC 184, 1961) has made the Catalogue of Portuguese Folktales possible. Compare the up-to-date version, The Types of International Folktales, with Antti Aarne' s original modest list (Verzeichnis der Märchentypen, FFC 3, 1910), which consisted mainly of Finnish folktales from an archive, supplemented with references to the collections of the Grimms' and of Grundtvig. Much of the progress has occurred recently, within the past twenty years. Sixty years ago, in annotating his collection of Spanish tales, Cuentos populares españoles (3 vols. Madrid, 1946-1947), Aurelio M. Espinosa provided AT type numbers but pointedly chose to override them when they did not reflect Hispanic tradition. Unlike national catalogs (or, for that matter, ATU), each of Espinosa' s notes is formed as an essay. Variants are sorted into groups that represent subtypes of the more general type; Hispanic variants (including Portuguese ones) are described in some detail and are situated in international tradition with reference to older, literary sources. These notes are still of value to readers and scholars interested in that aspect of Portuguese folktales.

Western Folklore, 2007

Fairy Godfather: Straparola, Venice and the Fairy Tale Tradition. By Ruth B. Bottigheimer. (Phila... more Fairy Godfather: Straparola, Venice and the Fairy Tale Tradition. By Ruth B. Bottigheimer. (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2002. Pp. viii + 156, introduction, map, photograph, illustrations, notes, bibliography, index. $39.95 cloth) This book addresses the contribution that Giovanfrancesco Straparola's two-volume Le piacevoli notti (Pleasant Nights) made to the emergence of the fairy tale as a literary genre. Because this work was a bestseller, with twenty editions appearing between 1551 and 1608 in Venice alone, and there are strong intertextual ties between Straparola's tales and those by Giovanbattista Basile, Charles Perrault, Madame de Murat, and Madame d'Aulnoy, Bottigheimer's endeavor has great potential. Before the publication of Jack Zipes' The Great Fairy Tale Tradition: From Straparola and Basile to the Brothers Grimm (2001), English-language students of fairy tales would not have been much aware of Straparola and others who have playe...

Contemporary Women's Writing, 2021

My first experience with Marina Warner's work was reading Alone of All Her Sex in the early 1980s... more My first experience with Marina Warner's work was reading Alone of All Her Sex in the early 1980s and, as a lapsed Catholic who had grown up in Italy, I found the book lifechanging. It retold the cultural history of the Virgin Mary critically and from a feminist perspective that did not, however, deny the emotional and stealthy power of this myth, "as spirited and as often imperceptible as an underground stream," on women as well as men (xxv). Warner's retelling of this underground story took shape through images, poetry, history, life narrative, and exegesis. As she made the imperceptible apparent, I understood and felt how exceptionality was weaponized against women in the everyday. Alone of All Her Sex continues to inspire in its exploration of untold stories, but because its project was not to pursue the "historical Mary" (xxii) or the historical women who embraced or rejected her as a model, it does not-and understandably so-really figure in Lisa Propst's book on "the ethics of telling silenced stories." Propst focuses on how Warner's oeuvre invites readers to hear otherwise silenced voices and on how she has all along been mindful of the responsibilities and challenges that come with doing so. Propst's study has distinctive and significant merits. It considers both Warner's fiction and nonfiction, thus showcasing the consistency of her ethical commitment. The book makes a complex case for how "Warner's work persistently negotiates two opposing pressures: the desire to tell stories that have been ignored and the dangers of appropriating other people's histories by laying claim to them in ways that perpetuate unequal power relations" (4). Within this analytical framework, Propst foregrounds varied strategies that Warner deploys over time and across genres, allowing for an appreciation of how narrative and ethical enquiry go together for Warner, but not along a single path or along one that is charted once and for all. The Introduction sets up the argument that Warner is not so much giving voice to people whose stories have been silenced or simply "retrieving" their stories, but rather "inventing them" (6), seeking to undo their silencing and to actively resist appropriation. Propst also provides a window into how Warner's personal history-for example, her growing up as an expatriate in post-WWII Cairo-has impacted

Folklore, 2018

This is a review of the new translation and interpretation of Charles Perrault's tales by Christi... more This is a review of the new translation and interpretation of Charles Perrault's tales by Christine Jones.

Marvels & Tales, Jan 1, 2008

... Knoxville: U of Tennessee P, 1989. 112–50. Gamble, Sarah. “Penetrating to the Heart of the Bl... more ... Knoxville: U of Tennessee P, 1989. 112–50. Gamble, Sarah. “Penetrating to the Heart of the Bloody Chamber: Angela Carter and the Fairy Tale.” Benson 20–46. Gopinath, Gayatri. ... Ed.Aboubakr Chraïbi. Paris: Actes Sud, 2004. 95–104. Randolph, Vance. ...

Narrative Culture, 2019

In 2019 Cristina Bacchilega and Anne Duggan co-edited three special issues around the theme of "... more In 2019 Cristina Bacchilega and Anne Duggan co-edited three special issues around the theme of "Thinking with Stories in Times of Conflict." Bacchilega & Duggan included selected works from the 2017 Detroit fairy-tale studies conference "Thinking with Stories in Times of Conflict" in Journal of American Folklore (vol. 132, no. 525, summer 2019), Marvels & Tales (vol. 33, no. 1, 2019), and Narrative Culture (vol. 6, no. 2, July 2019).
In pursuing M&T’s joint venture with these two other academic journals, we aimed to foster reading across journals and disciplines and worked with the journals’ publishers to make at least some part of each special issue available to non-subscribers.

The announcement to faculty and students at the University of Hawai'i-Mānoa publicizing the inter... more The announcement to faculty and students at the University of Hawai'i-Mānoa publicizing the international symposium "Folktales and Fairy Tales: Translation, Colonialism, and Cinema" in 2008 read: "We intend to explore the significance of folk and fairy tales within the contemporary world in a manner that is interdisciplinary and attentive to our location in the Pacific. This symposium seeks to stimulate conversations among scholars of folktales, fairy tales, and contemporary culture by focusing on social practices-translation and colonialism-that have, in different ways, shaped the history of both genres. Through public lectures, panel responses, and a public roundtable, we seek to make Hawaiian, Hawai'i-based, Pacific, and Asian concerns more visibly connected with and in critical dialog with the interdisciplinary fields of folklore and fairy-tale studies." Featured speakers included scholars from a range of disciplines. Noenoe Silva and Wazìyatawin are well-known intellectuals in the fields of Hawaiian and Native American indigenous politics, respectively; Donald Haase, Sadhana Naithani, and Jack Zipes are prominent scholars in folktale and fairy-tale studies, just as Vilsoni Hereniko and Steven Winduo are in Pacific Islands studies and literature. Coming from different discourse communities, these powerhouses of ideas were not necessarily familiar with each other's work. Other participating scholars, most of them from UHM, came from translation studies, film studies, creative writing, Hawaiian literature, American studies, international cultural studies, and folklore. While some of the lectures attracted an audience of a hundred or more, true to the symposium format, we conducted most of our discussions as

Marvels Tales, 2008

... Knoxville: U of Tennessee P, 1989. 112–50. Gamble, Sarah. “Penetrating to the Heart of the Bl... more ... Knoxville: U of Tennessee P, 1989. 112–50. Gamble, Sarah. “Penetrating to the Heart of the Bloody Chamber: Angela Carter and the Fairy Tale.” Benson 20–46. Gopinath, Gayatri. ... Ed.Aboubakr Chraïbi. Paris: Actes Sud, 2004. 95–104. Randolph, Vance. ...