The Routledge Companion to Fairy Tales

Claudia Schwabe, Christa Jones

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2025
• eBook ISBN: 9781040427002
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

The Routledge Companion to Fairy Tales provides a comprehensive guide to fairy tales across literatures and cultures. It offers an expansive overview of contemporary themes and issues throughout the intersections of the fields of fairy-tale studies, literary studies, and cultural studies.

The first part considers global formations of the canon and acts to decolonize the field of fairy-tale studies, highlighting the diverse national histories and traditions of the fairy tale worldwide. It demarcates the complex history of the field of fairy-tale studies and demonstrates how the genre is rooted in different oral stories and narratives passed down in cultures around the globe throughout time. The second section outlines important critical approaches, including recent developments shaping fairy-tale studies today such as disability studies, diversity, ecocriticism, inclusivity, and intersectionality. Part three explores how fairy tales have been articulated through a wide range of forms and combinations of textual, visual, and sound media. This section foregrounds the versatility and adaptability of the fairy tale and, more specifically, how it intersects with different art forms and genres, including literature, illustrations, performing arts, and media outlets. Section four addresses sociocultural concerns in transnational fairy-tale cultures and literatures examining the connections between fairy tales and multivocal influences in modern adaptations and postmodern reimaginings, the undoing of colonization and appropriation, feminism, politics and activisms, the canon, and controversies over authenticity.

This interdisciplinary collection draws on international perspectives from folkloristics, ethnology, ethnography, cultural and social anthropology, as well as queer and gender studies. It will be an invaluable resource for students and researchers interested in fairy tales and their developments over time and across cultures.

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half-Title Page
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• List of Contributors
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• Part I History and Global Formations of the Canon
• 1 NORTH AMERICAN Traditions: Transforming the Canon by Anthologizing and Adapting Indigenous and Immigrant Tales
• 2 SOUTH AMERICAN FAIRY-TALE TRADITIONS: Little Red Riding Hood in Alternative Itineraries
• 3 FRANZ BOAS AND JOHN ALDEN MASON IN PUERTO RICO (1914–1915): Jíbaro Rural Oral Fairy Tales
• 4 REMAKING THE NINE-TAILED FOX IN KOREAN FAIRY-TALE TELEVISION: Narrative, Gender, and Remediation
• 5 DECOLONIZING THROUGH DESI GENRES: Trans-Generic Approaches to South Asian Fairy Tales
• 6 TURKISH AND MIDDLE EASTERN FOLKTALES AND FAIRY TALES1
• 7 THE ARABIAN NIGHTS: Medieval Magic Tales and Hannā Diyāb’s Fairy Tales
• 8 HYBRIDIZING NATURE IN COLONIAL AUSTRALIAN AND NEW ZEALAND FAIRY TALES, 1891–1930
• 9 INFINITE DIVERSITY IN INFINITE COMBINATIONS : Folktales and Fairy Tales in Central and Eastern Europe Slavic Countries
• Part II Theories and Approaches
• 10 A Historicist Approach to the Evolution of Fairy Tales
• 11 Thinking with Fairy Tales: Cognitive Approaches to the Genre
• 12 Psychological and Therapeutic Approaches to the Fairy Tale
• 13 MULTISPECIES FAIRY-TALE STUDIES
• 14 A Question of Architecture: Structuralist, Formalist, and Post-Modern Approaches to Fairy Tales
• 15 Post-colonial Tricksters: African Diasporic Folklore in Contemporary Culture
• 16 Fairy Tales and Their Translatedness
• 17 Feminist, Gender, and Queer Theory
• 18 Mutation, Mutilation, Metamorphosis, Monstrosity: A Cripistemological Analysis of Disability and Difference in Old and New Fairy Tales
• Part III Art Forms and Genre Intersections
• 19 Literary Fairy Tales: Constructed Hybrids
• 20 FAIRY TALES AS CHILDREN’S AND YOUNG ADULT LITERATURE
• 21 TWENTY-FIRST CENTURY FAIRY-TALE ADAPTATIONS ON PAGE AND SCREEN
• 22 FAIRY-TALE PASTICHE: Nostalgia and Whimsy at Work in Abc’s Once Upon a Time and Disney’s Wish
• 23 Images of the Imaginary: Fairy-Tale Illustration and the Visual Arts
• 24 Manga and Anime
• 25 Sea Foam and Speech Bubbles: Fairy Tales, Comics, and Making Change Through Creative Scholarship
• 26 Unburied Moons: Fairy-Tale Artivism in the Western and Southern European Traditions
• 27 Abject Bodies in Classic and Contemporary Fairy Tales
• Part IV Fairy-Tale Practices and Controversies
• 28 Stone Soup: Controversies Over Authenticity
• 29 THE TRANSCULTURAL TEXTS OF (POST-)COLONIAL FOLKLORE COLLECTIONS: Examples from the Francophone World1
• 30 Feminist Controversies: Examining Fairy-Tale Retellings in the Context of Postfeminism. A Case of Young Adult Literature
• 31 Canon Controversies
• 32 “BUT IN THE DISNEY VERSION…”: Fairy Tales, Authenticity, and Controversy
• 33 THE FAIRY-TALE WEB
• 34 Colonialist and Racist Stereotyping in (Re)Translating and Illustrating: An Analysis of The Five Chinese Brothers
• 35 Marvelous Tales from Folks to Folks: Seeking What is Just from and with the Unconsidered
• Index