scholarly journals Ah!Nana’s Fairytale Punk-Comics: From the Comtesse de Ségur’s “Histoire de Blondine, Bonne-Biche et Beau-Minon” to Nicole Claveloux’s “Histoire de Blondasse, de Belle-Biche et Gros Chachat”

2021 ◽  
Vol 5 (1) ◽  
pp. 235-247
Author(s):  
Valentina Denzel
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Gender Roles ◽  
Fairy Tales ◽  
Role Models ◽  
Fairy Tale ◽  
Female Role ◽  
New Perspective ◽  
Second Wave ◽  
Binary Gender

Abstract During its brief existence from 1976 to 1978 the French underground feminist magazine Ah!Nana represented a powerful medium to discuss various topics related to women, sexuality, and discrimination. One of its main goals was to challenge traditional (literary) female role models, including housewives, submissive mothers, and “damsels in distress.” Through the adaptation of fairy tales, a genre particularly suited through its imaginative worlds to challenge preconceptions and norms, Ah!Nana deconstructed and questioned binary gender roles and heteronormativity. This article analyzes cartoon artist Nicole Claveloux’s queer adaptation of the nineteenth-century fairy tale “Histoire de Blondine, Bonne-Biche et Beau-Minon” (Blondine, the Good Doe, and the Gallant Cat) by the Comtesse de Ségur. Claveloux addresses her queer parody to an adult audience, and conveys a new perspective on gender, sexuality, and humanness that is in line with Ah!Nana’s promotion of second-wave feminist standpoints and punk culture. She advocates the exploration of new sexual pleasures, and the disruption of bourgeoisie values, including binary gender roles.

Victorian Fairy Tales

2016 ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Shortest Path ◽  
Fairy Tales ◽  
Fairy Tale ◽  
Good Deal ◽  
Rudyard Kipling ◽  
Ford Madox Ford ◽  
George Macdonald ◽  
Original Illustrations ◽  
Selection Of

The Queen and the bat had been talking a good deal that afternoon...' The Victorian fascination with fairyland vivified the literature of the period, and led to some of the most imaginative fairy tales ever written. They offer the shortest path to the age's dreams, desires, and wishes. Authors central to the nineteenth-century canon such as W. M. Thackeray, Oscar Wilde, Ford Madox Ford, and Rudyard Kipling wrote fairy tales, and authors primarily famous for their work in the genre include George MacDonald, Juliana Ewing, Mary De Morgan, and Andrew Lang. This anthology brings together fourteen of the best stories, by these and other outstanding practitioners, to show the vibrancy and variety of the form and its abilities to reflect our deepest concerns. In tales of whimsy and romance, witty satire and uncanny mystery, love, suffering, family and the travails of identity are imaginatively explored. Michael Newton's introduction and notes provide illuminating contextual and biographical information about the authors and the development of the literary fairy tale. A selection of original illustrations is also included.

The Irresistible Fairy Tale

2012 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jack Zipes
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Cognitive Science ◽  
Evolutionary Theory ◽  
Literary Theory ◽  
Fairy Tales ◽  
Fairy Tale ◽  
Great Difficulty ◽  
Film Adaptation ◽  
Wide Range ◽  
The World

If there is one genre that has captured the imagination of people in all walks of life throughout the world, it is the fairy tale. Yet we still have great difficulty understanding how it originated, evolved, and spread—or why so many people cannot resist its appeal, no matter how it changes or what form it takes. This book presents a provocative new theory about why fairy tales were created and retold—and why they became such an indelible and infinitely adaptable part of cultures around the world. Drawing on cognitive science, evolutionary theory, anthropology, psychology, literary theory, and other fields, the book presents a nuanced argument about how fairy tales originated in ancient oral cultures, how they evolved through the rise of literary culture and print, and how, in our own time, they continue to change through their adaptation in an ever-growing variety of media. In making its case, the book considers a wide range of fascinating examples, including fairy tales told, collected, and written by women in the nineteenth century; Catherine Breillat's film adaptation of Perrault's “Bluebeard”; and contemporary fairy-tale drawings, paintings, sculptures, and photographs that critique canonical print versions. While we may never be able to fully explain fairy tales, this book provides a powerful theory of how and why they evolved—and why we still use them to make meaning of our lives.

scholarly journals Sleeping Beauty

2019 ◽  
Vol 67 (2) ◽  
pp. 142-161
Author(s):  
Margreet Boomkamp
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
The Netherlands ◽  
Fairy Tales ◽  
Fairy Tale ◽  
High Standard ◽  
Sleeping Beauty ◽  
Brothers Grimm ◽  
Considerable Success ◽  
Precise Moment ◽  
Very High

The interest in fairy tales grew strongly over the course of the nineteenth century, particularly in Germany, the birthplace of Frans Stracké (1820-1898). Renowned artists made illustrations for popular publications of fairy tales and in the middleof the century characters from fairy tales also appeared in paintings and sculptures. The sculptor Frans Stracké was inspired by this development and in the eighteen-sixties created a Sleeping Beauty and a Snow White. He may have chosen these designs because the sleeping figure offers greater sculptural possibilities, for example in funeral art. He showed Sleeping Beauty at the precise moment she falls asleep, after she had pricked her finger on a spindle. Stracké followed the fairy tale by the Brothers Grimm from 1812, in which the ill-fated event was predicted during the celebration of Sleeping Beauty’s birth. Sleeping Beauty (also known as Briar Rose) was precisely the sort of subject Stracké preferred: he excelled in making genre-like sculpture of a very high standard. This was little appreciated in the Netherlands, whereas in France and Italy practitioners of this type of sculpture enjoyed considerable success. Stracké is credited with introducing contemporary developments in European sculpture into the Netherlands; Sleeping Beauty is a relatively early and typical example.

scholarly journals Fairy-Tale Symbolism: An Overview

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Francisco Vaz da Silva
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Sigmund Freud ◽  
Fairy Tales ◽  
Fairy Tale ◽  
Carl Jung ◽  
Semantic Field ◽  
Cognitive Research ◽  
Max Müller ◽  
Human Psyche ◽  
Wilhelm Grimm

Because the marvelous elements in fairy tales call for an explanation, a cohort of bright minds have pored over the problem of fairy-tale symbolism. Models sharing the nineteenth-century penchant for genetic inquiries have assumed that symbols are the survivals of archaic metaphors. Thus, Max Müller proposed that myths and fairy tales stem from obscured metaphors about solar phenomena; Sigmund Freud speculated that fairy-tale symbolism is the fossilized residue of primordial sexual metaphors; and Carl Jung submitted that symbols express immanent archetypes of the human psyche. Such early approaches assume that symbols convey fixed meanings, and they disregard the effects of folklore variation on meanings. Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm did take variation into account. They conceived Märchen in terms of immanent blueprints incessantly recreated in myriad retellings, but they never tried to make sense of the themes by means of the variants. This path was taken by folklorists influenced by Freud. Alan Dundes proposed to harness tale variants to grasp symbolic equivalences, and he pioneered the study of folk metaphors. But Dundes focused on preset Freudian symbols, a trend that Bengt Holbek followed. To this day, the prospect of addressing fairy-tale symbolism beyond Freud’s assumption of fixed translations remains elusive. Nevertheless, the basic tools are available. Maria Tatar remarked that fairy tales are metaphoric devices, and Claude Lévi-Strauss pointed out that metaphors—in switching terms that belong to different codes—lay bare the broader semantic field underlying each transposition. Müller, Freud, Dundes, Tatar, and Lévi-Strauss variously glimpsed metaphoric patterns in tale variations. The time is ripe to synthesize these intuitions in the light of contemporary cognitive research on conceptual metaphor, so as to address the creative dynamics of symbolism in fairy tales.

5. Childish things

2018 ◽  
pp. 75-85
Author(s):  
Marina Warner
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Scientific Knowledge ◽  
Fairy Tales ◽  
Fairy Tale ◽  
Moral Values ◽  
Printing Technology ◽  
Victorian Era ◽  
Young Readers

Fairy tale hovered as a form of literature between children and adults, but in the Victorian era, the fairy way of writing became a mode of communicating moral values, political dreams, and even scientific knowledge to children. Printing technology made books with pictures one of the most exciting and successful ventures of the nineteenth century, and fairy tales began to be produced deliberately to appeal to an audience of young readers. ‘Childish things: pictures and conversations’ explains that, on the whole, the role of artists who helped create fairy tales has been neglected. It describes the re-writing of fairy tales for this younger audience. Modern fairy tales display a darkening tone.

The Cultural Evolution of Storytelling and Fairy Tales: Human Communication and Memetics

2012 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jack Zipes
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Cultural Evolution ◽  
Fairy Tales ◽  
Fairy Tale ◽  
Social Institutions ◽  
Human Communication ◽  
Cultural Artifacts ◽  
The Enlightenment ◽  
Interdisciplinary Approaches ◽  
New Research

This chapter expands on the author's most recent books, Why Fairy Tales Stick and Relentless Progress, and includes new research by scholars interested in interdisciplinary approaches to cultural evolution. It clarifies why and how tales were created and told, and formed the basis of culture. It suggests that oral tales were imitated and replicated as memes in antiquity to form the fiber of culture and tradition. Taxonomies in the nineteenth century were established in response to recognizable features of tales as well as to organize and order types of stories. “Modern” genres originated during the Enlightenment and are basically social institutions that have defined cultural artifacts and patterns, divided them rationally into disciplines, and established rules and regulations for their study. In many ways, the fairy tale defies such definition and categorization.

Hyping the Grimms’ Fairy Tales

2014 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jack Zipes
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Fairy Tales ◽  
Fairy Tale ◽  
Culture Industry ◽  
Reading Public ◽  
Brothers Grimm ◽  
The Media

This chapter discusses how the Grimms became involved in hyping their own tales to change their reception at the beginning of the nineteenth century. It first considers some of the theoretical aspects of hyping and the particular role hyping plays in the media paratexts of the culture industry. Hereafter the chapter reviews how the Brothers Grimm changed the format and scope of their tales, primarily under the influence of Taylor's 1823 translation, German Popular Stories, to make their tales more accessible to the general reading public in Germany. Lastly, the chapter examines some recent filmic adaptations of fairy tales and considers whether the hyping of these films detracts from the value of the fairy-tale genre and storytelling in general.

Is the Twilight Saga a Modern-Time Fairy Tale? A Study of Stephenie Meyer’s Source Material from Folklore and Canonical Narratives

2019 ◽  
pp. 101-110
Author(s):  
Shiri Rosenberg
Keyword(s):  
Fairy Tales ◽  
Role Models ◽  
Fairy Tale ◽  
Coming Of Age ◽  
First Century ◽  
Cultural Stereotypes ◽  
Narrative Functions ◽  
Characteristic Sequences ◽  
And Gender ◽  
Stock Character

The article presents an analysis of Stephenie Meyer’s Twilight novels as modern literary fairy-tales. To this end, the discussion will refer to structuralist critics, and identify “narrative functions” from folktales (stock images and episodes, stock character functions, characteristic sequences of episodes), used by Meyer in her vampire novels. As it turns out, Meyer modified folklore material to sustain a long and variously themed narrative: by embedding numerous subplots, by rearranging functions between characters, and creating composite and collective characters that combine contradictory functions. The author transformed several folktales into a series of four novels about coming of age in the twenty-first-century United States. A detailed analysis of Meyer’s modifications of the folktale partially corroborates the feminist critique of Meyer’s representation of the protagonists as reinforced versions of cultural stereotypes and gender roles. However, some transformations, especially Meyer’s assignment of the hero-function to the female protagonist Bella, seem to suggest just the opposite, thus leading to the conclusion that the Twilight novels reflect the confusion caused by contradictory role-models and aspirations, the confusion that seems to be inherent in a coming-of-age novel.

scholarly journals Reading Hair as a Symbol to Understand Changing Gender Roles in “Rapunzel” and Rapunzel’s Revenge

2018 ◽  
Vol 17 (3) ◽  
pp. 53-72
Author(s):  
Suchismita Duttagupta
Keyword(s):  
Gender Roles ◽  
Fairy Tales ◽  
Fairy Tale ◽  
Young Readers ◽  
Traditional Gender Roles ◽  
Counter Narrative

Fairy tales have always been captivating for young readers. Since most of the fairy tales have their source in oral folktales, they highlight traditional gender roles and create stereotypes. As Maria Nikolajeva (2003) states, fairy tales reflect its own time and society. Evolution in readership has led to a change in these reflections. “Rapunzel” is one of the most iconic fairy tale characters and she is known for her long golden hair. Hair carries symbolic implications and is often associated with femininity, and exhibits how societal control influences how she/he wears their hair. By the transformation of her hair in the adaptations, the authors depict a change in the traditional gender roles. Rapunzel’s Revenge by Shannon and Dean Hale will be read as a counter-narrative to Grimm‟s “Rapunzel” to investigate the changes in the fairy tale genre and enable a reading of the changing hair symbolism in order to understand the change in gender roles and identity.

Selection criteria for the biographies of female role models

1978 ◽  
Author(s):  
Agnes N. O'Connell ◽  
◽  
Nancy Felipe Russo
Keyword(s):  
Role Models ◽  
Selection Criteria ◽  
Female Role
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