“The movies had not prepared him for this Teutonic version here”: The Significance of the Hansel and Gretel Fairy Tale in Thomas Pynchon’s Gravity’s Rainbow (original) (raw)
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Fairy Tales in Service of Political Projects: “Hansel and Gretel” in Changing Political Regimes
Marvels & Tales, 2024
The production of fairy tales depends on political interests. The tales’ regimes of production and anticipated reception condition their inscribed ideological inclinations and erasures. I examine how Kinder- und Hausmärchen by the brothers Grimm contributed to nation-building and, focusing on “Hansel and Gretel,” how the changing regimes of production required omissions in the translations of the Grimms’ tales into Slovenian. I argue that the sui generis appropriation of the tale titled “Janko and Metka” by the writer France Bevk helped build a socialist nation. Finally, the article comments on some issues in capitalist regimes of fairy-tale production.
The Irresistible Fairy Tale: The Cultural and Social History of a Genre by Jack Zipes (review)
Children's Literature Association Quarterly, 2013
List of Illustrations ix Preface xi Acknowledgments xvii Chapter 1: The Cultural Evolution of Storytelling and Fairy Tales: Human Communication and Memetics 1 Chapter 2: The Meaning of Fairy Tale within the Evolution of Culture 21 Chapter 3: Remaking "Bluebeard," or Good-bye to Perrault 41 Chapter 4: Witch as Fairy/Fairy as Witch: Unfathomable Baba Yagas 55 Chapter 5: The Tales of Innocent Persecuted Heroines and Their Neglected Female Storytellers and Collectors 80 Chapter 6: Giuseppe Pitre and the Great Collectors of Folk Tales in the Nineteenth Century 109 Chapter 7: Fairy-Tale Collisions, or the Explosion of a Genre 135 Appendix A: Sensationalist Scholarship: A "New" History of Fairy Tales 157 Appendix B: Reductionist Scholarship: A "New" Definition of the Fairy Tale 175 Notes 191 Bibliography 209 Index 227
In my paper I will talk about the reception of fairy tales by the people from different sections of society. How these fairy tales tended to construct the gender identity. But now the responses to these tales have evolved. The response of woman living in a modern world tends to deconstruct the traditional meaning espoused by the text. There are various reconstruction of these fairy tales in modern literature, cinema and cartoons. Every reconstruction provides a new meaning of the text by a new reader. Apart from this I will also focus on the response of the people from working class. The society in fairy tales is portrayed as harmonious. The class tensions are never depicted in these tales. The responses of people from lower strata would bring out the reception of reader from a different section of society.
Fairy Tale Futures: Critical Reflections
2020
This article provides critical reflections on Stijn Praet and Anna Kérchy’s edited collection, The Fairy Tale Vanguard: Literary Self-Consciousness in a Marvelous Genre (2019). Vanguard can be defined as “the foremost part of an advancing army or naval force,” with established and emerging critics marching in defence of the fairy tale against the genre’s complicated reception throughout the ages. The form’s self-consciousness and intertextual complexity is foregrounded, with fairy tale experiments ranging from those of 17th-century French female conteuses, to modernist short stories and contemporary films, which all combine into a celebration of the genre’s sophistication and continued relevance. The book engages with the generic complexity of the fairy tale, defying any kind of neat categorisation. ‘Fairy tale’ often functions as a ‘catch-all’ term for different fairy tale narratives, but this study paves the way for reflections on new subgenres such as the ‘anti-tale’. Finally, it...
Forever Young: Childhoods, Fairy Tales and Philosophy
Global Studies of Childhood
Fairy tales play a substantial role in the shaping of childhoods. Developed into stories and played out in picture books, films and tales, they are powerful instruments that influence conceptions and treatments of the child and childhoods. This article argues that traditional fairy tales and contemporary stories derived from them use complex means to mould the ways that children live and experience their childhoods. This argument is illustrated through representations of childhoods and children in a selection of stories and an analysis of the ways they act on and produce the child subjects and childhoods they convey. The selected stories are examined through different philosophical lenses, utilizing Foucault, Lyotard and Rousseau. By problematizing these selected stories, the article analyses what lies beneath the surface of the obvious meanings of the text and enticing pictures in stories, as published or performed. Finally, this article argues for a careful recognition of the complexities of stories used in early childhood settings and their powerful and multifaceted influences on children and childhoods.
Capitalism in deep woods: a materialist theory of fairytale
This paper discusses representations of and relations with nature in Western fairy tales as imbuing the values of capitalist symbolic order. The fairy tales are here understood symbolic representations of the capitalism-in-nature concept. In the interpretation by Bruno Bettelheim, a fairy-tale helps a child find meaning in life, grasp family relations and overcome childhood fears of maturation. In this paper I attempt to expand Bettelheim's already extraordinary insights by placing them within the framework of the capitalist order, discussing in particular how various forms of bourgeois values-labour, nuclear family, commodity, desire-lurk in from the woods of the fairy tales. Opening the world of fairy tales to children can thus be seen as an early introduction to the logic of capitalism, conveying a natural order rewarding resolution to the child who recognizes and integrates these values. The purpose of this paper is to contribute to denaturalizing the totality of capitalist logic and to evacuate the symbolic order that produces capitalism-in-nature. In the western literary canon, fairy tales have a unique place. They have a profound effect on their young audience, as they bring meaning and, from a very young age, enrich the lives of their listeners, like no other form of literature. In his unique study of fairy tales "The uses of enchantment", Bruno Bettelheim transcribes the symbolic elements of the fairy tale, uncovering hidden meanings that are addressing concerns of a child. These literary works-part of childhood for millions of children-retold over centuries and then collected across Europe during the early modern age, provide comforting and secure elements of identification, aid children in their growth, and guides them as they struggle to create meaningful relationships in the world. In classical psychoanalytic tradition, Bettelheim reveals the mysteries of the fairy tales as the content of the unconscious. The fairy tale organizes the unconscious material for the child and guides her through her doubts and fears toward maturation and a meaningful existence in the world. As a something of an intervention, I will offer a different reading of the Western fairy tale; i.e. a material critique of Bettelheim's reading of it. In other words, I will engage in a dialogue with Bettelheim and the reader to bring forward the material substrate of the fairy tales; in order to expand on Bettelheim's phenomenal analysis as I will try to place it in its corresponding historical context. Namely, the content of the fairy tales is neither ahistorical nor universal, as it may appear from his analysis. The fairy tale emerged through a transformation from gory and violent folk tales, as the emerging bourgeois society commenced a profound shift in values. Many early tales have strong religious connotations, yet the most famous fairy tales seem have subdued the religious overtones. As fairy tales had been collected during the birth of the European bourgeois secular society, the religious canons of morality and the good life faded from the collective consciousness and were replaced by a radically different ethos: that of the capitalist morality entrenched in private