Volume 29, Issue 1 (2015) Queer(ing) Fairy Tales

From the Editors

We are happy to be publishing this special issue, “Queer(ing) Fairy Tales” with guest editor Lewis C. Seifert, author of Fairy Tales, Sexuality, and Gender in France, 1690–1715: Nostalgic Utopias (1996) and, more recently, Manning the Margins: Masculinity and Writing in Seventeenth-Century France (2009), which opens up the queer possibilities of seventeenth-century French texts by male writers and paves the way for the present special issue. Several contributors have made their mark in the growing area of queer fairy-tale studies. Kay Turner and Pauline Greenhill edited Transgressive Tales: Queering the Grimms (2012), to which Jennifer Orme contributed an essay on Jeanette Winterson; all three scholars continue their queer(ing) work here in their readings of “Frau Holle,” “The Snow Queen,” and “Little Red Riding Hood,” respectively. Having written extensively on queer possibilities in medieval texts and children’s literature, Tison Pugh teases out the queerness of John R. Neill’s illustrations for L. Frank Baum’s Oz books. Seifert’s “Introduction” contextualizes how queer(ing) fairy tales can and will take us on different paths. Such paths include queer forms of temporality, explored in Turner’s reading of “Frau Holle” and Seifert’s reading of Charles Perrault’s classic version of “Sleeping Beauty”; and visual queering, foregrounded in essays not only by Pugh but also by Orme, as she pursues the queer invitation offered by David Kaplan’s film Little Red Riding Hood. For her part, Greenhill examines the queer tensions in Hans Christian Andersen’s “Snow Queen” and how male directors play out these tensions—or not—on-screen. Together these essays invite the queering of fairy tales across mediums, time, and place in ways that challenge the conventional understanding of the genre as predominantly heteronormative. We are also happy to announce in this issue two innovative online research tools, the International Fairy-Tale Filmography and Fairy Tales on Television.

Cristina Bacchilega and Anne E. Duggan