New Book: Cinderella across Cultures: New Directions and Interdisciplinary Perspectives (Series in Fairy-Tale Studies)

Cinderella across Cultures: New Directions and Interdisciplinary Perspectives (Series in Fairy-Tale Studies) edited by by Martine Hennard Dutheil de la Rochère, Director Gillian Lathey, and Monika Wozniak was released in June. I have been putting off posting about it because I was hoping to find a list of the table of contents online to copy and paste since I don't want to retype the three pages of contents to share with you.

After six weeks, I still haven't found a table of contents to copy and paste. The best I can do is a list of the contributors--the book is comprised of 18 articles about Cinderella divided into three categories: I. Contextualizing Cinderella, II. Regendering Cinderella, and III. Visualizing Cinderella. Here are the contributors.

Cristina Bacchilega (Preface), Ruth B. Bottigheimer (Contributor), Kathryn Hoffmann (Contributor), Cyrille François (Contributor), Talitha Verheij (Contributor), Daniel Aranda (Contributor), Ashley Riggs (Contributor), Mark MacLeod (Contributor), Book Review Editor Jennifer Orme (Contributor), Rona May-Ron (Contributor), Roxane Hughes (Contributor), Sandra L. Beckett (Contributor), Jan Van Coillie (Contributor), Agata Holobut (Contributor), Xenia Mitrokhina (Contributor), Jack Zipes (Contributor)

The articles are excellent and offer a wide range of topics. The middle section--Regendering Cinderella--offers more of the expected types of literary analysis articles, discussing Margaret Atwood and Angela Carter as well as Emma Donoghue and Donna Jo Napoli's visions of Cinderella. Several articles are also LGBT focused.

The other sections range wider to many cultural interpretations of Cinderella primarily in Eastern Europe in the Visualizing Cinderella section.

While all the sections are interesting, my personal interests were most satisfied by the articles under Contextualizing Cinderella, such as the article about Robert Samber's translation of the tale and other articles discussing how the tale has been adapted and retold for various points in times and cultures.

Overall, excellent stuff. I received a review copy but it was on my list to purchase if I didn't. If you are at all interested in Cinderella studies, this is a must.

Book description:

The Cinderella story is retold continuously in literature, illustration, music, theatre, ballet, opera, film, and other media, and folklorists have recognized hundreds of distinct forms of Cinderella plots worldwide. The focus of this volume, however, is neither Cinderella as an item of folklore nor its alleged universal meaning. In Cinderella across Cultures, editors Martine Hennard Dutheil de la Rochère, Gillian Lathey, and Monika Wozniak analyze the Cinderella tale as a fascinating, multilayered, and ever-changing story constantly reinvented in different media and traditions.

The collection highlights the tale's reception and adaptation in cultural and national contexts across the globe, including those of Italy, France, Germany, Britain, the Netherlands, Poland, and Russia. Contributors shed new light on classic versions of Cinderella by examining the material contexts that shaped them (such as the development of glass artifacts and print techniques), or by analyzing their reception in popular culture (through cheap print and mass media). The first section, "Contextualizing Cinderella," investigates the historical and cultural contexts of literary versions of the tale and their diachronic transformations. The second section, "Regendering Cinderella," tackles innovative and daring literary rewritings of the tale in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, in particular modern feminist and queer takes on the classic plot. Finally, the third section, "Visualising Cinderella," concerns symbolic transformations of the tale, especially the interaction between text and image and the renewal of the tale's iconographic tradition.

The volume offers an invaluable contribution to the study of this particular tale and also to fairy­­-tale studies overall. Readers interested in the visual arts, in translation studies, or in popular culture, as well as a wider audience wishing to discover the tale anew will delight in this collection.