Academic literature on the topic 'Representation of the feminine in fairy tales'

This chapter examines three Sleeping Beauty retellings to illustrate the way dystopian scenarios complicate traditional fairy tale tropes. Dystopian literature and fairy tale retellings often feature elements of embodiment, romance, and political activism, and this chapter uses these key notions to consider how the dystopian fairy tale deploys feminist empowerment. While YA dystopian fairy tales often highlight collective action and social activism to resist the status quo, others reproduce troubling representations of passive heroines. This chapter argues that the dystopian YA fairy tale is uniquely primed to address the potential and power of contemporary young women.

This chapter uses the previous analyses to construct the conventions of the ‘Gothic for Girls’ subgenre and reflect on its development and position within children’s literature. It surveys existing work on childhood and Gothic, with a particular focus on the fairy tale and the cautionary tale as subgenres of children’s literature. It argues that Misty combines Female Gothic tropes with fairy tale markers to create stories that bring together adult and child concerns. The chapter concludes by relating Misty to some contemporary dark fairy tales and offering a working definition of Gothic for Girls. Elements include an isolated or trapped female protagonist in an abstracted world that juxtaposes the mundane and supernatural, a narrative awakening to magical potential that is often driven by fear and particularly terror, the use of feminine symbols and fairy tale sins as catalysts, and the weight placed on personal responsibility and self-control or self-acceptance.

The history of study of the Russian literary tales is set out in writing as emergence of tendencies or existence of different schools and their representatives. Every epoch, trend and certain scientists advanced the new ideas carried on by other experts in the process of further development of science. Therefore, the description of the history of study of tales corresponds to the description of evolution of this scientific branch according to some tendencies demonstrating and concentrating certain issues. The study of the literary tales is asserted to be closely associated with the history of the country and the ways of reflection of people’s self-consciousness. The public, literary and scientific interest in the tales came into existence as far back as the XVIII-th c., went through the period of astounding growth in the XIX-th c., the decline in the first half and the renaissance in the second half of the XX-th c. The stable attention to tales is paid at the turn of the XXI-st century. Scientists persistently searched a platform for the systematization of tales, examined the peculiarities of this genre – its main features, characteristics, definitions – in order to distinguish tales from other genres. Both a form of a tale and its content – with the prospective morals – were carefully analysed. The form and the content (or the idea) either were separated or opposed till the scientists came to the brilliant thought of their unity as the form represented a shell in which an idea or a world-view found their expression. A great Russian scientist A. Veselovskiy insisted on the necessity of creating morphology of tales, later this task was performed by the other famous Russian researcher V. Propp. V. Propp did not fix the separate features in poetics of tales but he focused on their structure and composition as a whole. Also, the relation of constant, invariable elements of tales to changeable, variable elements was gradually studied and defined. The modern scientific views are based on the thought that the essence of literary tales as the phenomenon of spiritual culture is likely to be expanded in the process of studying the origin, the development, the interpretation of tales and exceeding the limits of the genre. In the present article the point of view is illustrated that the history of tales is so complex and their study is so difficult that they can hardly ever be kept within the definite bounds. The fairy tales of A. Pushkin have the peculiar attractiveness because they bear the stamp of genius of their creator. The present research in hermeneutics of the Russian literary tales is based on the tales by A. Pushkin as the most capacious hermeneutical paradigms. It should be noted that for the first time an attempt to reveal and interpret their hidden, inherent meanings has been made on the basis of hermeneutics of the works of art.

This chapter examines Sondheim’s plays from Sunday in the Park with George to Road Show. While still engaging in the postmodern interrogation of knowledge and the limits of representation, these plays suggest a desire to find a direct experience of the real. Sunday in the Park explores the creation and purpose of art. Into the Woods uses traditional fairy tales to explore the connections between narrative and identity. Assassins overturns the ideas of official American history and the American Dream. Passion marks a clear dissatisfaction with the absorption of reality into representation. Caught within a web of language, the characters long for a reality—love—outside self-referring discourse. The Frogs examines the social inertia that results from the devolution of language from communication to cliché. Road Show sets two brothers in a societal closed system in which art, narrative, and language tend toward exhaustion.