In Cervantes’s El retablo de las maravillas, which is based on the international folk tale known as The Emperor’s New Clothes, the women spectators jump on top of chairs and wrap their skirts tightly ...around their ankles when the narrator describes a great number of mice that supposedly appear on stage. A Portuguese folk story that I recorded in 1975 from an old lady from Madeira in San Diego, California, confirms that the women are so terrified because mice were seen as being phallic. A second tale, a border joke recorded in 1974 from an immigrant from Trás-os-Montes in Toronto, which tells how a Spaniard and a Portuguese try to inflate an ass in order to sell it for a better price, shows that Cervantes was inspired by a similar story in order to chastise Avellaneda for daring to write a continuation of Part I of Don Quijote. These two stories, of course, help to confirm the importance of the relationship between folklore and literature.
The Snow Queen (1845), by Hans Christian Andersen, and Snow White (1812) by the Brothers Grimm. ...we will focus on the relation of Pizarnik's work with its explicit hypotext, Valentine Penrose's La ...comtesse sanglante, considering the aforementioned, that is, the way fairy tales operate as a matrix in this transfer. Freud, en cierta medida, desestima la importancia de los factores apuntados por Ernst Jentsch, para quien el caso por excelencia de lo siniestro es "'la duda de que un ser aparentemente animado sea en efecto viviente; y a la inversa: de que un objeto sin vida esté en alguna forma animado', aduciendo con tal fin la impresión que despiertan las figuras de cera, las muñecas sabias y los 'autómatas'" (2488). Por otra parte, con respecto a la asociación entre sexualidad y violencia que percibimos en "La Reina de las Nieves", cuando ocurre el pasaje a la adolescencia del personaje masculino, cabe señalar que esto coincide con el planteo de LCS: "Si el acto sexual implica una suerte de muerte, Erzébet Báthory necesitaba de la muerte visible, elemental, grosera, para poder, a su vez, morir de esa muerte figurada que viene a ser el orgasmo" (Pizarnik 287). "The Snow Queen".
Hans Christian Andersen's “The Snow Queen” might be considered as one of the most beloved fairy-tale plots in Russian culture and is surprisingly popular among contemporary Russian-speaking writers ...of fan fiction. In the article, fan fiction devoted to Andersen's tale is analyzed through a combination of qualitative and quantitative methods in order to reflect on more general questions about the process of retelling. “The Snow Queen” stimulates fan-fiction authors to rethink the topic of love triangle. These authors propose their own visions of the conflict by concentrating on gender roles and unrealistic representations of human relationships. A semiotic perspective is employed to show the how metacommunication is a multistage process and a key mechanism of cultural dynamics.
Pr., 2015) xiii + 227 $24.95 Laurence Talairach-Vielmas, Fairy Tales, Natural History and Victorian Culture and Melanie Keene, Science in Wonderland: The Scientific Fairy Tales of Victorian Britain ...join join a well-established body of scholarship on the Victorian fascination with folklore, fairy belief and various forms of fairy narrative - from Richard Dorson's landmark book The British Folklorists: A History (1968) to Molly Clark Hillard's recent Spellbound: The Fairy Tale and the Victorians (2014). In Fairy Tales, Natural History and Victorian Culture, she turns to canonical works of children's literature (such as Charles Kingsley's The Water Babies, Mary Louisa Molesworth's Christmas-Tree Land, and Edith Nesbit's Five Children and It); periodicals for adults (The Strand) and for children (primarily Aunt Judy's Magazine, Boy's Own Magazine and John Newbery's Lilliputian Magazine); classic fairy tales (by Charles Perrault, the Borthers Grimm, and Hans Christian Andersen) - as well as lesser-known science education texts that draw with surprising frequency on discourses associated with magic, fantasy, and fairy. In some cases, popular science texts suggest that works of natural history could well replace traditional fairy tales as the favored reading material of early childhood, as is the case in the 1863 English edition of Louis Figuier's World Before the Deluge (51).
The fairy tale has a special role in forming Gianni Rodari's mind-set and writing. Fairy tales, with their ability to overturn social and cultural customs, models of behavior, and hierarchies of ...class and species were an inexhaustible driving mechanism for the creativity of this Italian children's writer. He also drew much inspiration from fairy tales for his educational works on the subject of childhood and imagination. The aim of this contribution is to reflect on the value that Rodari attributed to the fairy tale within an educational setting aimed at young generations, a vital mediator between adult culture and childhood culture.
A feminist/queer/crip close textual reading of Disney's The Little Mermaid and its straight-to-DVD sequel, The Little Mermaid II: Return to the Sea, uncovers contrasting cultural narratives of ...disability. The first film, and mermaid Ariel's story line, represent conservative ideologies of compulsory able-bodiedness and the need for overcoming disability, as well as a strongly reinforced binary of merfolk versus humans. Conversely, the sequel, and (Ariel's and Prince Eric's daughter) Melody's narrative, imagine more progressive desirably disabled futurities and welcome hybrid embodiments through the process of shifting societal perspectives and deconstructing binaries that work to other those with nonnormative bodies.
In Hans Christian Andersen’s iconic fairy tale, Den grimme ælling (The Ugly Duckling, 1843), we learn that “it does not matter that one has been born in the henyard as long as one has lain in a ...swan’s egg.” Claims to supremacy, worth, and belonging are nested in a children’s story about “nature” and bolstered by biological notions of kin and kind – some eggs are naturally better than others. Since Andersen’s nineteenth-century tale, the lost/found/switched egg narrative has become a trope in children’s literature, particularly in stories that explore themes of family and belonging, and yet little scholarly attention has been given to the egg in this regard. Drawing on queer, feminist, and posthumanist frameworks inspired by Donna Haraway’s natureculture thinking, this article examines the deployment of the egg-switch trope in Andersen’s The Ugly Duckling, in relation to two contemporary picturebooks, And Tango Makes Three (Parnell and Richardson, 2005), and The Odd Egg (Gravett, 2008). I treat the material-symbolic presence of the egg in these texts as a generative site for interrogating the construction and perpetuation of dominant notions of kin and kind, considering the complex and slippery ways that nature is called upon to uphold ideas of exceptionalism and normativity through discourses of origin and species. At the same time, acknowledging the concurrent conservative and radical potentialities of literature for children (Jaques), and guided by Rosi Braidotti’s affirmative ethics and Eve Sedgwick’s queer reparative approaches to criticism, I also read these texts as imaginative sites for noticing and theorizing alternative queer models of relationality that elevate chosen, non-biological, and cross-species kin.
Hans Christian Andersen’s tale, “The Little Mermaid,” has been adored by both children and parents for decades. The tale shows an astonishingly different quality to Andersen’s early genre of fairy ...tales, which allows the reader to sense his keenness on the meaning of human sexuality. The author used the short narrative form, becoming more conservative, cautious, and concise in his ideological compromise between religiosity and human nature. “The Little Mermaid” is a tale that draws the reader in about “universal preoccupations” of femininity, self-concept, and self-actualization. Andersen’s intentions and the authenticity of this tale should not be overlooked.
Contrary to what we might prefer, the popularity of most novels rarely depends on the quality of the writing, and those rare books that stay in our memories for the rest of our lives often exploit ...the same tropes that dozens of clumsily written, best-selling potboilers do. The Marsh King's Daughter, by Karen Dionne, was named a best book of the year by Library Journal and is one of the finalists for the 2017 Hammett Prize for Literary Excellence in Crime Writing. The Legacy also demonstrates Yrsa's skill in combining tropes, as she employs the trope of the serial murderer challenging detectives with arcane clues that must be deciphered, something familiar from Red Dragon, The Bone Collector, and episodes of Criminal Minds. Palmyra, Virginia Contrary to what we might prefer, the popularity of most novels rarely depends on the quality of the writing, and those rare books that stay in our memories for the rest of our lives often exploit the same tropes that dozens of clumsily written, best-selling potboilers do. How uncreative!" J. Madison Davis is the author of eight mystery novels, including The Murder of Frau Schütz, an Edgar nominee, and Law and Order: Dead Line.
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