Re-Orienting the Fairy Tale: Contemporary Adaptations across Cultures seeks to "re-orient" the fairy tale across different cultures, media, and disciplines and proposes new approaches to the ever-expanding fairy-tale web in a global context with a special emphasis on non-Euro-American materials. Editors Mayako Murai and Luciana Cardi bring together emerging and established researchers in various disciplines from around the world to decenter existing cultural and methodological assumptions underlying fairy-tale studies and suggest new avenues into the increasingly complex world of fairy-tale cultures today.
Divided into three parts, the fourteen essays cover a range of materials from Hawaiian wonder tales to Japanese heroine tales to Spanish fairy-tale film adaptation. Chapters include an invitation from Cristina Bacchilega to explore the possibilities related to the uncanny processes of both disorientation and re-orientation taking place in the "journeys" of wonder tales across multiple media and cultures. Aleksandra Szugajew’s chapter outlines the strategies adopted by recent Hollywood live-action fairy-tale films to attract adult audiences and reveals how this new genre offers a form of global entertainment and a forum that invites reflection on various social and cultural issues in today’s globalizing world. Katsuhiko Suganuma draws on queer theory and popular musicology to analyze the fairy-tale intertexts in the works of the Japanese all-female band Princess Princess and demonstrate that popular music can be a medium through which the queer potential of ostensibly heteronormative traditional fairy tales may emerge. Daniela Kato’s chapter explores the ecological dimensions of Carter’s literary fairy tale and offers an ecofeminist interpretation of a fairy-tale forest as a borderland that lies beyond the nature-culture dichotomy.
Readers will find inspiration and new directions in the cross-cultural and interdisciplinary approaches to fairy tales provided by Re-Orienting the Fairy Tale.
Author(s): Mayako Murai and Luciana Cardi
Series: Series in Fairy-Tale Studies
Publisher: Wayne State University Press
Year: 2020
Cover Page
Title Page
Copyright Page
Contents
Acknowledgments
Introduction
Part I. Disorienting Cultural Assumptions
1. Fairy Tales in Site: Wonders of Disorientation, Challenges of Re-Orientation
2. Mo‘olelo Kamaha‘o 2.0: The Art and Politics of the Modern Hawaiian Wonder Tale
3. Re-Orienting China and America: Yeh-Shen: A Cinderella Story from China and Its TV Adaptation
4. Monstrous Marionette: The Tale of a Japanese Doll by Angela Carter
Part II. Exploring New Uses
5. Japanese Heroine Tales and the Significance of Storytelling in Contemporary Society
6. Who’s Afraid of Derrida & Co.? Modern Theory Meets Three Little Pigs in the Classroom
7. Adults Reclaiming Fairy Tales through Cinema: Popular Fairy-Tale Movie Adaptations from the Past Decade
8. Trespassing the Boundaries of Fairy Tales: Pablo Berger’s Silent Film Snow White
Part III. Promoting Alternative Ethics and Aesthetics
9. Re-Orienting the Fairy Tale, Revising Age?
10. Re-Orienting Fairy-Tale Childhood: Child Protagonists as Critical Signifiers of Fairy-Tale Tropes in Transnational Contemporary Cinema
11. Alice on the Edge: Girls’ Culture and “Western” Fairy Tales in Japan
12. Magical Bird Maidens: Reconsidering Romantic Fairy Tales in Japanese Popular Culture
13. When Princess(es) Will Sing: Girls Rock and Alternative Queer Interpretation
14. The Plantation, the Garden, and the Forest: Biocultural Borderlands in Angela Carter’s “Penetrating to the Heart of the Forest”
Contributors
Index
