Wonderland Lost and Found? Nonsensical Enchantment and Imaginative Reluctance in Revisionings of Lewis Carroll’s Alice Tales (original) (raw)
Related papers
The Fairy-Tale Vanguard: Literary Self-Consciousness in a Marvelous Genre
2019
Ever since its early modern inception as a literary genre unto its own, the fairy tale has frequently provided authors with a textual space in which to reflect on the nature, status and function of their own writing and that of literature in general. At the same time, it has served as an ideal laboratory for exploring and experimenting with the boundaries of literary convention and propriety. While scholarship pertaining to these phenomena has focused primarily on the fairy-tale adaptations and deconstructions of postmodern(ist) writers, this essay collection adopts a more diachronic approach. It offers fairy-tale scholars and students a series of theoretical and literary-historical expositions, as well as case studies on English, French, German, Swedish, Danish, and Romanian texts from the seventeenth to the twenty-first century, by authors as diverse as Marie-Catherine dAulnoy, Rikki Ducornet, Hans Christian Andersen and Robert Coover.
THE REIMAGINING OR RUINING OF THE FAIRY TALE: ANGELA CARTER AND ANDRZEJ SAPKOWSKI
INTERNATIONAL SYMPOSIUM OF EDUCATION AND VALUES proceedings , 2020
One of the most salient characteristic of fairy tales is their flexibility and adaptability, as they are able to sustain numerous modifications and yet retain their recognizable form. On the one hand, this is most convincingly a result of their preliterate origins, when they spread across nations with the help of the oral tradition, valued greatly in each and every corner of the world. On the other, we must not underestimate the archetypal roots of all fairy tales. Archetypes transcend locality and reflect the universal human experience, pointing to a common source of imagery in the collective unconscious. Pertaining the fairy tale modifications, a distinction needs to be made between unintentional alterations and intentional ones. As examples of intentional modifications, we have the reimaginings and the use of fairy tales as propaganda. This essay will present the most famous examples of intentional modification of some of the now classic fairy tales, first by Charles Perrault in the 17 th century and then by the Brothers Grimm in the 19 th century. As examples of the 20 th and the 21 st century, we are going to provide some insight into the reimaginings of Angela Carter and her collections of short stories The Bloody Chamber (1979) and Andrzej Sapkowski's fantasy series (of short stories and novels), The Witcher, published between 1993 and 2013. While Carter's reimaginings are mostly feminist, Sapkowski reimagines the fairy tales with a little more grueling detail as well as humor. Finally, is there such a degree of modification that we can qualify as too-re-imagined?
Breaking the Magic Spell: Radical Theories of Folk and Fairy Tales (review)
Children's Literature Association Quarterly, 1981
If a critique of everyday life is to become a serious undertaking, virtually everything we experience needs to be subjected to careful and critical scrutiny. Even fairy tales. Like so much else in modern culture, these tales may not be as innocuous as they appear. To the extent that the culture industry has appropriated them and uses their motifs to manipulate consciousness or shape behavior, especially in children, fairy tales may be more effective as instruments of social control than one would think. Perhaps for this reason the study of these tales is too important to be left to folklore aficionados or specialists in children's literature. Two groups have recently noticed the larger social or psychological importance of fairy tales, and have tried to approach them in original ways. The first are the psychotherapists, whose work has lately gained some attention, and the second are the Marxists, whose work remains practically unknown in this country. The psychotherapists have turned to fairy tale material to see what it might reveal about certain psychic states, the meaning of dream symbolism, recurrent Oedipal and incest motifs, or stages in sexual development. In the Freudian tradition, one can find most of these themes as far back as the early work of Karl Abraham (1909), Otto Rank (1912), and Freud himself (1913). 1 Bruno Bettelheim's much publicized The Uses of Enchantment (1974) must also be placed in this tradition. However, there is another, a Jungian, line of interpretation that has contributed even more extensively to fairy tale research. Not surprisingly, this line discovers not primarily Oedipal or sexual themes, but collective archetypes, shadow figures, Great Mothers, anima and animus symbols, and the like. Besides Jung's own essay on the subject of fairy tales (1954), there are more exhaustive studies in this vein by two of his disciples, Marie-Louise von Franz and Hedwig von Beit. 2 The others who have recently taken a closer look at folk and fairy tales are the Marxist (or Marxist-informed) scholars, particularly those in Germany. One can find the tentative beginnings of a radical approach to the tales in parts of Ernst Bloch's Erbschaft dieser Zeit (1935) and Das Prinzip Hoffnung (1938-1947), but these starting points have been developed in a more complete way in the contemporary work of August Nitschke, Dieter Richter, Johannes Merkel, and others. 3 Zipes' new book comes directly out of this second tradition. His main concern is elucidating the social rather than the psychological meanings and values contained in folk or fairy tales. If there is any "liberation" to be achieved by creatively working through the tales, Zipes wants it to be not simply personal or mental, but social and cultural liberation as well. By looking at matters from this perspective, he significantly changes the questions usually asked of fairy tales. He also helps alter the focus of
Meta-imagination in Lewis Carroll’s Literary Fairy Tales about Alice’s Adventures
2019
Alice's Adventures in Wonderland, published by Charles Dodgson under the penname Lewis Carroll in 1865, followed by Through the Looking-Glass in 1872, constituted a veritable milestone on Victorian fantasists' "quest for a new fairy-tale form [that] stemmed from the psychological rejection and rebellion against the 'norms' of English society", since, as Jack Zipes adds, it "made one of the most radical statements on behalf of the fairy tale and the child's perspective" by liberating the genre from preexisting literary templates, moralizing didacticism, and the codified worldview of common-sense adult reality, while "encouraging young readers to think for themselves" (Victorian Fairy 73, xx-xxii). The nineteenth-century revival of the fairy-tale genre was meant just as much to entertain as to educate readers by questioning social injustices (induced by the industrial revolution and class hierarchy) while legitimizing the entitlement of all human beings to equal rights to the exercise of imagination endowed with humanitarian powers. My paper focuses on the Alice tales' multiply meta-layered fictionalization of complex cognitive capacities, such as thinking of oneself thinking and in particular imagining others imagining. I aim to explore how Carroll manages to represent fantasizing agency as an ontological necessity, a mode of empathic relationality to others, a self-healing therapeutic and problem-solving mechanism and, overall, a dynamic process conjoining make-belief and disbelief, psychic automatism and intellectual innovation, dream and logic, sentiment and wit, fancy and imagination, illusion and reality, solidarity and autonomy, childish and adult views. I argue that Carroll's Victorian literary fairy tales can be regarded as revolutionary, vanguardist forerunners to postmodernist metaperspectivism, which, curiously, seems to surface in Chapter Three 56 his writings in a manner more subversive of consensual sign systems and more empowering for creative mental games than in the case of related post-World War II fiction.
'Intertextuality and the Fairy Tale' in Angela Carter's The Bloody Chamber'
The article analyses Carter's collection of revisioned fairy tales in the context of intertextuality, showing how Carter uses oral material to challenge contemporary perceptions of classic fairy tales, reversing the process of turning these tales into children's tales and using deviant, subversive strategies to produce feminist versions which challenge perceptions of gender.
Journal of the Short Story in English. Les Cahiers de la nouvelle, 2011
Cet article s’attache a l’interaction du texte et de l’image dans les contes de Perrault traduits par Angela Carter et illustres par Martin Ware (The Fairy Tales of Charles Perrault, 1977), comme une forme de dialogue intersemiotique particulierement productif. Il demontre que les illustrations originales de Ware ne mettent pas seulement en question l’assimilation des contes a la litterature de jeunesse (qui est encore la perspective adoptee par la traductrice dans ce livre), mais permettent aussi de saisir un aspect essentiel mais jusque-la ignore du procession de creation dans l’oeuvre de Carter, a savoir la dynamique qui lie la traduction, l’illustration et la reecriture des contes classiques. Plusieurs elements des illustrations de Ware sont ainsi repris et elabores dans The Bloody Chamber and Other Stories (1979), la collection de “stories about fairy stories” qui rendit Carter celebre. La transposition de details et de strategies visuelles dans l’ecriture donnent ainsi l’occas...
Looking for the Ugly: The Anti-heroine in Revisionist Fairy Tales
This research paper was submitted for assessment under the GCE A'Level H3 Literature examination. Little girls grow up with the misleading notion that the suppression of their imperfections and personal desires is necessary for their happily-ever-afters, as reinforced by fairy tale favourites like Charles Perrault’s “Cinderella”, Grimm Brothers’ “Little Red Riding Hood” and Hans Christian Andersens’s “The Little Mermaid”. Charles Perrault’s moral in “Cinderella” highlights the importance of both beauty and “graciousness” in determining the attractiveness of a woman. Thus, revisionist fairy tales like Angela Carter’s The Bloody Chamber, Emma Donoghue’s Kissing the Witch and Gregory Maguire’s Wicked subvert the original tales to re-imagine archetypal heroines and their antagonists: the wicked witches and beasts. In their deviance from conventional damsel-in-distress characteristics, these female protagonists are presented to be anti-heroines.The aim of this study is to examine the anti-heroine figures in my chosen revisionist fairy tales, in their many dimensions. The themes that I would explore in my examination of the anti-heroine’s identity include the archetypal notion of good versus evil, the fulfillment of desires, and the operation of fate surrounding these protagonists. I would expound on these themes through analysis of motifs, symbols and sensorial images employed by the authors so as to evoke a sense of repulsion and attraction. Such ambivalence would be felt on both the protagonists’ and readers’ parts. As the notion of repulsion and attraction has uncanny connotations, a potentially useful approach to my research would be Freudian theory, particularly the notion of the Unheimliche.