Marvels & Tales Copyright (c) 2013 Wayne State University All rights reserved. http://digitalcommons.wayne.edu/marvels Recent documents in Marvels & Tales en-us Tue, 18 Jun 2013 05:55:34 PDT 3600 Reviews http://digitalcommons.wayne.edu/marvels/vol27/iss1/7 http://digitalcommons.wayne.edu/marvels/vol27/iss1/7 Thu, 04 Apr 2013 07:00:24 PDT Far North Tales: Stories from the Peoples of the Arctic Circle. Translated and retold Bonnie C. Marshall; ed. Kira Van Deusen. Review by Alexander D. King, University of Aberdeen.

The Frog Prince and Other Frog Tales from Around the World. Edited by Heidi Ann Heiner. Rapunzel and Other Maiden in the Tower Tales from Around the World. Edited by Heidi Ann Heiner. Sleeping Beauties: Sleeping Beauty and Snow White Tales from Around the World. Edited by Heidi Ann Heiner. Review by Helen Pilinovsky, Barnard College.

The Fairy Tales of the Brothers Grimm. Edited by Noel Daniel. Translated by Matthew R. Price. Review by Clementine Beauvais, University of Cambridge.

Es war einmal . . . : Die wahren Märchen der Brüder Grimm und wer sie ihnen erzählte. Edited by Heinz Rölleke. Illustrated by Albert Schindehütte. Review by Jack Zipes, University of Minnesota.

At the Back of the North Wind. By George MacDonald. Edited by Roderick McGillis and John Pennington. Review by Laurence Talairach-Vielmas, University of Toulouse, Le Merail.

One Earth, One People: The Mythopoeic Fantasy Series of Ursula K. Le Guin, Lloyd Alexander, Madeleine L’Engle, and Orson Scott Card. By Marek Oziewicz. Review by Stephen D. Winick, American Folklife Center, Library of Congress.

Freud in Oz: At the Intersections of Psychoanalysis and Children’s Literature. By Kenneth B. Kidd. Review by Karen Coats, Illinois State University.

Fantasy, Myth, and the Measure of Truth: Tales of Pullman, Lewis, Tolkien, MacDonald, and Hoffmann. By William Gray. Review by Jennifer L. Miller, Valparaiso University.

Arab-American Women’s Writing and Performance: Orientalism, Race, and the Idea of The Arabian Nights. By Somaya Sami Sabry. Review by Jeana Jorgensen, Indiana University-Purdue University of Indianapolis.

Contes de la mille et deuxième nuit: Théophile Gautier, Edgar Allan Poe, Nicolae Davidescu, Richard Lesclide, et André Gill. Edited and partly translated by Evanghélia Stead. Review by Dominique Jullien, University of California, Santa Barbara.

Inklings. By Françoise Pétrovitch. Review by Eric Birkeland, New York City.

]]> Marvels & Tales Editors Contributors http://digitalcommons.wayne.edu/marvels/vol27/iss1/8 http://digitalcommons.wayne.edu/marvels/vol27/iss1/8 Thu, 04 Apr 2013 07:00:24 PDT Marvels & Tales Editors “With a smile and a song . . .”: Walt Disney and the Birth of the American Fairy Tale http://digitalcommons.wayne.edu/marvels/vol27/iss1/6 http://digitalcommons.wayne.edu/marvels/vol27/iss1/6 Thu, 04 Apr 2013 07:00:23 PDT Using the new frameworks for analysis of Disney animation laid out by scholars such as Douglas Brode and Nicholas Sammond, I apply a sociohistorical treatment to Disney’s version of 'Snow White.' My central thesis is that Disney changed the story of Snow White in order to incorporate the new ideology of the 1930s, including the transformation of the American Dream of success. This work preempted the studio’s involvement in shaping national myths for propagandistic purposes during World War II in America.

]]> Tracey Mollet <em>Hoodwinked!</em> and <em>Jin-Roh: The Wolf Brigade</em>: Animated “Little Red Riding Hood” Films and the Rashômon Effect http://digitalcommons.wayne.edu/marvels/vol27/iss1/5 http://digitalcommons.wayne.edu/marvels/vol27/iss1/5 Thu, 04 Apr 2013 07:00:22 PDT Two otherwise diverse films, Jin-Roh: The Wolf Brigade (1999), a Japanese anime reflection on an apocalyptic past and present intended for adults, and Hoodwinked! (2005), a child-friendly film featuring Little Red Riding Hood and her grandmother as cookie capitalists, share thematic connections to ATU 333 and crime and an animated format. Both also narrate different characters’ stories about criminal acts, invoking Kurosawa’s Rashômon (1950). This comparison fosters exploration of storytelling modes connecting fairy-tale, filmic, and legal discourses; how fairy-tale narrative contexts, performances, narrations, and texts relate to criminal justice rhetorics; and objectivist and postmodern viewpoints on narrative and truth.

]]> Pauline Greenhill et al. “Reeling In” Grimm Masculinities: Hucksters, Cross-Dressers, and Ninnies http://digitalcommons.wayne.edu/marvels/vol27/iss1/4 http://digitalcommons.wayne.edu/marvels/vol27/iss1/4 Thu, 04 Apr 2013 07:00:22 PDT In American films Wilhelm and Jacob Grimm appear as malleable as the folktales they collected and published. Not just framed by their cultural production, the Grimms are read through it. As a result, North American assumptions about folktales and fairy tales imbue the brothers with peculiar characteristics. The pliability of the brothers across mediated representations encourages viewers to interrogate the authority of storytellers and historical truth. I describe the filmed Grimms’ failure to meet American cinema’s normative standards for heterosexual masculine performance and explore the tension between feminized oral traditions and masculinized literary heritage that resurfaces in each film.

]]> Kendra Magnus-Johnson Slaying Blunderboer: Cross-Dressed Heroes, National Identities, and Wartime Pantomime http://digitalcommons.wayne.edu/marvels/vol27/iss1/3 http://digitalcommons.wayne.edu/marvels/vol27/iss1/3 Thu, 04 Apr 2013 07:00:21 PDT The late Victorian pantomime role of principal boy can be and sometimes was seen as existing outside established gender categories, even as actresses performed in exaggerated fashion some of the markers of both femininity and masculinity. Whether defeating villains, introducing a parade of national types, or leading the audience in song, the cross-dressed principal boy also served as a focal point for fantasies of Englishness. I focus on an 1899 Drury Lane pantomime production of "Jack and the Beanstalk," specifically the ways that contemporaneous anxieties about the Second Boer War resonate in the panto’s trademark forms of spectacle and burlesque. Drawing on the panto script and accounts of the production, I argue that the principal boy’s ambiguous relation to gender categories positioned her as an apt embodiment of the ambitions, desires, and anxieties of "empire" at the fin de siècle.

]]> Jennifer Schacker The Revolutionary Undoing of the Maiden Warrior in Riyoko Ikeda’s <em>Rose of Versailles</em> and Jacques <em>Demy’s Lady Oscar</em> http://digitalcommons.wayne.edu/marvels/vol27/iss1/2 http://digitalcommons.wayne.edu/marvels/vol27/iss1/2 Thu, 04 Apr 2013 07:00:20 PDT Maiden warriors in the classical Chinese and French traditions fight to support the regime of a patriarchal monarchy. Defending family honor and feudal order, these heroines prove that women are indeed necessary to the state. In Ikeda’s manga The Rose of Versailles and Demy’s film adaptation of the manga, however, the maiden warrior ends up fighting instead to dismantle a monarchical feudal order, which comes to a head in the French Revolution. Demy goes further than Ikeda in challenging the tradition of the maiden warrior by questioning the implicit class prejudices underlying the order that upholds forms of aristocratic heroism.

]]> Anne E. Duggan Thoughts on “Heroinism” in French Fairy Tales http://digitalcommons.wayne.edu/marvels/vol27/iss1/1 http://digitalcommons.wayne.edu/marvels/vol27/iss1/1 Thu, 04 Apr 2013 07:00:19 PDT Fairy tales starring cross-dressed knights who make war present a clear case of “heroinism.” What, then, of other female characters who populate the corpus of 1690s France? Can famously persecuted heroines like Cinderella be said to do anything brave and worthy of note? I take the motif of war as an opportunity to reflect on heroinism as broadly conceived in French fairy tales. Active heroines manage their domestic spheres, and other heroines rhetorically maneuver their way out of binds. Viewed against the spectacle of war, these ordinary actions may seem quiet, but they are no less heroic.

]]> Christine A. Jones Index http://digitalcommons.wayne.edu/marvels/vol26/iss2/8 http://digitalcommons.wayne.edu/marvels/vol26/iss2/8 Mon, 24 Sep 2012 11:10:00 PDT Marvels & Tales Editors Contributors http://digitalcommons.wayne.edu/marvels/vol26/iss2/7 http://digitalcommons.wayne.edu/marvels/vol26/iss2/7 Mon, 24 Sep 2012 11:09:59 PDT Marvels & Tales Editors Reviews http://digitalcommons.wayne.edu/marvels/vol26/iss2/6 http://digitalcommons.wayne.edu/marvels/vol26/iss2/6 Mon, 24 Sep 2012 11:09:59 PDT The Columbia Anthology of Chinese Folk and Popular Literature. Edited by Victor H. Mair and Mark Bender. Review by Jörg Bäcker, University of Bonn.

The Cloak of Dreams: Béla Balázs. Translated and introduced by Jack Zipes. Review by Catriona McAra, University of Huddersfield

The Complete Fairy Tales. By Charles Perrault. Translated by Christopher Betts. Ilustrations by Gustave Doré. Review by Shyamala Mourouvapin, Wayne State University

Enchanted Eloquence: Fairy Tales by Seventeenth-Century French Women Writers. Edited and translated by Lewis C. Seifert and Domna C. Stanton. Reviewed by Bérénice V. Le Marchand, San Francisco State University

A. S. Byatt: Critical Storytelling. By Alexa Alfer and Amy J. Edwards de Campos. Reviewed by Elizabeth Wanning Harries, Smith College

146 Marvelous Geometry: Narrative and Metafiction in Modern Fairy Tale. By Jessica Tiffin. Reviewed by Jennifer Orme, Reyerson University, Toronto

Postmodern Reinterpretations of Fairy Tales: How Applying New Methods Generates New Meanings. Edited by Anna Kérchy. Foreward by Martine Hennard Dutheil de la Rochère. Reviewed by Karin Kukkonen, St. John's College, Oxford

Anti-Tales: The Uses of Disenchantment. Edited by Catriona McAra and David Calvin. Reviewed by Martine Hennard Dutheil de la Rochère, University of Lausanne

Critical and Creative Perspectives on Fairy Tales: An Intertextual Dialogue Between Fairy-Tale Scholarship and Postmodern Retellings. By Vanessa Joosen. Reviewed by Christy Williams, Hawai'i Pacific University

Over the Rainbow: Queer Children's and Young Adult Literature. Edited by Michelle Ann Abate and Kenneth Kidd. Reviewed by John David Zuern, University of Hawai'i, Mānoa

Grimms Wörter: Eine Liebeserklärung. By Günter Grass. Reviewed by Jack Zipes, University of Minnesota

Cinderella Ate My Daughter: Dispatches from the Front Lines of the New Girlie-Girl Culture. By Peggy Orenstein. Reviewed by Sara Thompson, York University

Visions of the Jinn: Illustrators of the Arabian Nights. By Robert Irwin. Reviewed by Ulrich Marzolph, Georg-August-Universität and Enzyklopädie des Märchens, Göttingen

The Flight of the Mermaid. By Gita Wolf and Sirish Rao. Illustrated by Bhajju Shyam. Reviewed by Malini Roy, SIM University, Singapore

Whatever Gets You Through the Night: A Story of Sheherezade and the Arabian Entertainments. By Andrei Codrescu. Reviewed by Jennifer Gipson, University of Wisconsin, Madison

Tangled. Directed by Nathan Greno and Byron Howard. Reviewed by Kendra Magnusson, University of Manitoba

]]> Marvels & Tales Editors Tough Magical Nuts to Crack: Cristina Campo's Reflections on Fairy Tales http://digitalcommons.wayne.edu/marvels/vol26/iss2/5 http://digitalcommons.wayne.edu/marvels/vol26/iss2/5 Mon, 24 Sep 2012 11:09:58 PDT Fairy tales play an essential role in the prose writings of the Italian poet, essayist, and literary translator Cristina Campo (1923–1977). As she writes in her only overtly autobiographical piece, fairy tales are like those magic walnuts that, once cracked, rescue their bearer at the moment of greatest danger. Although critics have commented on Campo's theories of fairy tales, in this essay I provide a more systematic exploration of the meaning of fairy tales in each of Campo's essays collected in Gli imperdonabili. Emphasis is given to Campo's Christian interpretation, the influence of Simone Weil's philosophy, and the recurring themes of suffering, hope, and transformation.

]]> Cristina Mazzoni Aimee Bender's Fiction and the Intertextual Ingestion of Fairy Tales http://digitalcommons.wayne.edu/marvels/vol26/iss2/4 http://digitalcommons.wayne.edu/marvels/vol26/iss2/4 Mon, 24 Sep 2012 11:09:58 PDT If, as Stephen Benson describes them, Angela Carter, Robert Coover, Margaret Atwood, A. S. Byatt, and Salman Rushdie constitute the "fairy-tale generation" prominent at the end of the twentieth century, Aimee Bender may be a leading figure of the next generation. Bender's contribution to the fairy-tale corpus broadly comprises four categories: acknowledgment of conventional form; intertextual appropriation of common themes and motifs; an exploration of the fairy tale's paradigm of the family dynamic; and the invention of fresh autonomous tales. Throughout her surrealist fiction Bender incorporates familiar fairy-tale patterns into new stories about the negotiation of loss, disconnection, and fragmentation in a postmodern world.

]]> Jo Carney Glass Beauty: Coffins and Corpses in A. S. Byatt's <em>Possession</em> http://digitalcommons.wayne.edu/marvels/vol26/iss2/3 http://digitalcommons.wayne.edu/marvels/vol26/iss2/3 Mon, 24 Sep 2012 11:09:57 PDT A. S. Byatt's 1990 novel Possession has been the subject of numerous works of criticism, yet the images of glass that pervade the narrative have received scant attention. Nor has the glass coffin itself been fully examined as a metaphor for the cold, untouchable beauty of the two female protagonists. Byatt's reworking of the glass coffin motif is a central strategy of the novel, negotiating the reification of beauty implicated in its metaphorical relationship to glass. Ultimately, the idealized glass beauty of Snow White is drawn into collusion, not collision, with the vicissitudes of the flesh.

]]> Carina Hart "You Must Kill Her": The Fact and Fantasy of Filicide in "Snow White" http://digitalcommons.wayne.edu/marvels/vol26/iss2/2 http://digitalcommons.wayne.edu/marvels/vol26/iss2/2 Mon, 24 Sep 2012 11:09:57 PDT Common critical readings of "Snow White" focus on the way in which the story allows child readers to explore their taboo feelings about interfamilial conflict, but in this essay I make a case for a different interpretation. Drawing on the narrative origins, original audience, and publication history of the tale, I argue that the ongoing appeal of "Snow White" is not that it allows young people to work through psychological jealousy for their mother but rather - and much more disturbingly - that it allows the nation's parents the opportunity to indulge in homicidal fantasies toward their children.

]]> Michelle Ann Abate Fairy Gold: The Economics and Erotics of Fairy-Tale Pantomime http://digitalcommons.wayne.edu/marvels/vol26/iss2/1 http://digitalcommons.wayne.edu/marvels/vol26/iss2/1 Mon, 24 Sep 2012 11:09:56 PDT For nearly two centuries the English theatrical tradition of Christmas pantomime has served as a significant medium for the transmission of fairy tales. Highly profitable and erotically charged, pantomime complicates received histories of the genre. By the late nineteenth century a select number of tales had emerged as panto standards-the vast majority of which originated in French print traditions. In a print domain increasingly dominated by field-based collections and a new breed of literary tale, pantomimes maintained cultural centrality while simultaneously providing a vocabulary with which Victorian commentators would criticize French literary fairy tales.

]]> Jennifer Schacker Contributors http://digitalcommons.wayne.edu/marvels/vol26/iss1/6 http://digitalcommons.wayne.edu/marvels/vol26/iss1/6 Fri, 11 May 2012 09:32:29 PDT .

]]> Marvels & Tales Editors Reviews http://digitalcommons.wayne.edu/marvels/vol26/iss1/5 http://digitalcommons.wayne.edu/marvels/vol26/iss1/5 Fri, 11 May 2012 09:32:28 PDT The Arabian Nights: Tales of 1001 Nights. Translated by Malcolm C. Lyons with Ursula Lyons. Introduced and annotated by Robert Irwin. Review by Ulrich Marzolph, Enzyklopädie des Märchens.

The Grimm Reader: The Classic Tales of the Brothers Grimm. Edited and translated by Maria Tatar. Introduction by A. S. Byatt. Review by Karen Seago, City University, London.

Mulan's Legend and Legacy in China and the United States. By Lan Dong. Review by Cheryl Narumi, Naruse University of Hawai'i, Mānoa.

Eastern Dreams: How the Arabian Nights Came to the World. By Paul McMichael Nurse. Review by Bonnie D. Irwin, Eastern Illinois University.

The Story-Time of the British Empire: Colonial and Postcolonial Folkloristics. By Sadhana Naithani. Review by John Holmes McDowell, Indiana University.

Suspended Animation: Children's Picture Books and the Fairy Tale of Modernity. By Nathalie op de Beeck. Review by Jack Zipes, University of Minnesota.

Fairy Tale Films: Visions of Ambiguity. Edited by Pauline Greenhill and Sidney Eve Matrix. Foreword by Jack Zipes. Review by Cathy Lynn Preston, University of Colorado.

The Enchanted Screen: The Unknown History of Fairy-Tale Films. By Jack Zipes. Review by Pauline Greenhill, University of Winnipeg.

My Mother She Killed Me, My Father He Ate Me. Edited by Kate Bernheimer with Carmen Giménez Smith. Foreword by Gregory McGuire. Review by Kevin Goldstein, New York University.

Beastly. Written and directed by Daniel Barnz; with Alex Pettyfer, Vanessa Hudgens, Mary-Kate Olsen, Lisa Gay Hamilton, and Neil Patrick Harris. Review by Amanda L. Anderson, University of Louisiana at Lafayette.

The Princess and the Frog. Directed by Ron Clements and John Musker; with Anika Noni Rose and Bruno Campos. Review by Tabatha Lingerfelt, Indiana University.

Red Riding Hood. Directed by Catherine Hardwicke. Written by David Leslie Johnson; with Amanda Seyfried, Gary Oldman, Billy Burke, Shiloh Fernandez, Max Irons, Virginia Madsen, Lukas Haas, and Julie Christie. Review by Sara Thompson, York University.

]]> Marvels & Tales Editors Antonio Buero Vallejo's <em>Almost a Fairy Tale</em>: <em>A Gloss of Perrault, in Three Acts</em> http://digitalcommons.wayne.edu/marvels/vol26/iss1/4 http://digitalcommons.wayne.edu/marvels/vol26/iss1/4 Fri, 11 May 2012 09:32:26 PDT The dramaturgy of Antonio Buero Vallejo (1916–2000), known as buerismo, was characterized by enhanced realism and historical allegory. In three of his early plays, Buero molds and transforms the conventional meaning of known texts into something fresh, touchingly human, and provocative. This is indeed the case with Casi un cuento de hadas (Almost a Fairy Tale, 1953), a play in which Buero reworks Charles Perrault's "Riquet with the Tuft" to explore the theme of perception versus reality as it relates to human personality on the one hand and, in a veiled manner, the political culture of Franco's Spain on the other.

]]> Bonnie McSorely Nabokov's <em>Ada</em> and <em>The 1001 Nights</em> http://digitalcommons.wayne.edu/marvels/vol26/iss1/3 http://digitalcommons.wayne.edu/marvels/vol26/iss1/3 Fri, 11 May 2012 09:32:25 PDT The influence of 1001 Nights on Vladimir Nabokov's Ada is explored. Although the narrator's evocation of the erotic and magical ambiance of the Nights reveals his intention to display himself as the Shahrazad of his memoir, his promiscuous behavior and violent conduct recall his congruity with Shahriyar. Moreover, Van and Ada's narcissistic love makes them morally blind to their half-sister, Lucette, who is associated by Nabokov with Dunyazade. This association leads to significant motifs in the novel, displays the unreliability of the narrator, and highlights Nabokov's moral art.

]]> Seyed Gholamreza Shafiee-Sabet et al.