Postmodern Fairy Tales seeks to understand the fairy tale not as children's literature but within the broader context of folklore and literary studies. It focuses on the narrative strategies through which women are portrayed in four classic stories: "Snow White," "Little Red Riding Hood," "Beauty and the Beast," and "Bluebeard." Bacchilega traces the oral sources of each tale, offers a provocative interpretation of contemporary versions by Angela Carter, Robert Coover, Donald Barthelme, Margaret Atwood, and Tanith Lee, and explores the ways in which the tales are transformed in film, television, and musicals.

Scholars of fairy-tale studies will enjoy Bacchilega's significant new study of contemporary adaptations.

Postmodern Reinterpretations of Fairy Tales : How Applying New Methods Generates New Meanings

The Palgrave Handbook of Magical Realism in the Twenty-First Century examines magical realism in literatures from around the globe. Featuring twenty-seven essays written by leading scholars, this anthology argues that literary expressions of magical realism proliferate globally in the twenty-first century due to travel and migrations, the shrinking of time and space, and the growing encroachment of human life on nature. In this global context, magical realism addresses twenty-first-century politics, aesthetics, identity, and social/national formations where contact between and within cultures has exponentially increased, altering how communities and nations imagine themselves. This text assembles a group of critics throughout the world—the Americas, Europe, Africa, Asia, the Middle East, and Australia—who employ multiple theoretical approaches to examine the different ways magical realism in literature has transitioned to a global practice; thus, signaling a new stage in the history and development of the genre.

The first systematic approach to the parallels between fairy-tale retellings and fairy-tale theory.

In what way can we look today at the fairy tale and its tradition? The fairy tale, born as an oral process based upon formulaic repetitions, becomes in contemporary writers a typically literary process founded upon the play with tradition and the recovering of formulas in an experimental sense. The user of a fairy tale makes personal use of it, resorting to manipulations and re-writings helpful for his particular needs. The expansion of the fairy tale shows its endless literary evolution thanks to the monumentalisation of the written word. The classic fairy tale needs to die in order to be reborn as literary play. In fact the writing of the tale of wonder absorbs its oral antecedents and reconstitutes original human consciousness.

"The present volume contains thirty-five fairy tales by nineteen writers, presented chronologically by author"--Introduction.