Fairy Tales Transformed?: Twenty-First-Century Adaptations and the Politics of Wonder
Cristina Bacchilega
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· 1 ratings · 296 pages · Published: 01 Nov 2013
Bacchilega begins by assessing changes in contemporary understandings and adaptations of the Euro-American fairy tale since the 1970s, and introduces the fairy-tale web as a network of reading and writing practices with a long history shaped by forces of gender politics, capitalism, and colonialism. In the chapters that follow, Bacchilega considers a range of texts, from high profile films like Disney's "Enchanted, " Guillermo del Toro's "Pan's Labyrinth, "and Catherine Breillat's "Bluebeard" to literary adaptations like Nalo Hopkinson's "Skin Folk," Emma Donoghue's "Kissing the Witch, " and Bill Willingham's popular comics series, "Fables." She looks at the fairy-tale web from a number of approaches, including adaptation as "activist response" in Chapter 1, as remediation within convergence culture in Chapter 2, and a space of genre mixing in Chapter 3. Chapter 4 connects adaptation with issues of translation and stereotyping to discuss mainstream North American adaptations of "The Arabian Nights" as "media text" in post-9/11 globalized culture.
Bacchilega's epilogue invites scholars to intensify their attention to multimedia fairy-tale traditions and the relationship of folk and fairy tales with other cultures' wonder genres. Scholars of fairy-tale studies will enjoy Bacchilega's significant new study of contemporary adaptations.