New Book: Re-Orienting the Fairy Tale: Contemporary Adaptations across Cultures

Re-Orienting the Fairy Tale: Contemporary Adaptations across Cultures (Series in Fairy-Tale Studies) by Mayako Murai and Luciana Cardi is officially released on August 25, 2020. It is available for pre-order.

Book description:

Re-Orienting the Fairy Tale: Contemporary Adaptations across Cultures seeks to "re-orient" the fairy tale across different cultures, media, and disciplines and proposes new approaches to the ever-expanding fairy-tale web in a global context with a special emphasis on non-Euro-American materials. Editors Mayako Murai and Luciana Cardi bring together emerging and established researchers in various disciplines from around the world to decenter existing cultural and methodological assumptions underlying fairy-tale studies and suggest new avenues into the increasingly complex world of fairy-tale cultures today.

Divided into three parts, the fourteen essays cover a range of materials from Hawaiian wonder tales to Japanese heroine tales to Spanish fairy-tale film adaptation. Chapters include an invitation from Cristina Bacchilega to explore the possibilities related to the uncanny processes of both disorientation and re-orientation taking place in the "journeys" of wonder tales across multiple media and cultures. Aleksandra Szugajew's chapter outlines the strategies adopted by recent Hollywood live-action fairy-tale films to attract adult audiences and reveals how this new genre offers a form of global entertainment and a forum that invites reflection on various social and cultural issues in today's globalizing world. Katsuhiko Suganuma draws on queer theory and popular musicology to analyze the fairy-tale intertexts in the works of the Japanese all-female band Princess Princess and demonstrate that popular music can be a medium through which the queer potential of ostensibly heteronormative traditional fairy tales may emerge. Daniela Kato's chapter explores the ecological dimensions of Carter's literary fairy tale and offers an ecofeminist interpretation of a fairy-tale forest as a borderland that lies beyond the nature-culture dichotomy.

Readers will find inspiration and new directions in the cross-cultural and interdisciplinary approaches to fairy tales provided by Re-Orienting the Fairy Tale.

Reviews:

Re-Orienting the Fairy Tale represents a significant contribution to an emerging area of inquiry in which there is a great deal of intellectual interest. Since many of the themes explored are not treated comprehensively elsewhere, it will prove attractive to a readership seeking to understand cutting-edge developments in the field of study. The book is also socially and intellectually important in the challenges it makes to hierarchical and binaristic thinking and in its determination to revalue indigenous storytelling cultures that have been marginalized by neo-imperial global media.

– Andrew Teverson, author of The Fairy Tale World

In its Puckish way, this volume pleasantly disorients scholars who are familiar only with the path of Eurocentric concepts of fairy tales. In so doing, it leads them to robust storytelling traditions from many non-Western cultures. Meanwhile, contributors’ postmodern strategies, lucidly developed, offer provocative ways to appreciate familiar Western tales.

– Bill Ellis, professor emeritus of English and American studies, Penn State University

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