The aim of this article is to trace the literary historiography of the Bengali "rupkatha" or the fairy tale. It is a conscious decision to use the two terms--"rupkatha" and fairy tale interchangeably in the paper because it has been argued that the genre of the Bengali "rupkatha" received its shape and form in…

Oscar Wilde was described by W. B. Yeats as "a man of action, a born dramatist." Although people did not recognize him as a serious playwright until the 1890s, Wilde had managed to find other outlets for his theatrical passion, for example in writing fiction. In this paper, it is argued that Wilde incorporates metadrama into his 1888…

Love, beauty, and the good are three key concepts of Platonic aesthetics, which frequently appear in the fairy tales of Oscar Wilde, a classical scholar deeply influenced by Plato and his philosophy. Plato's views on music, as a part of his aesthetics, were championed by Wilde, who regarded music as "the perfect type of art." It is…

Oscar Wilde never danced as a hobby, but he was keen on featuring dancers in his literary works. His fairy-tale collections provide detailed depictions of dancing, ranging from classic ballroom dance to strange, uncanny kinds. The motif of dancing in Wilde's stories conveys the idea of estrangement in a double sense: referring to the divisions in…

Shannon Hale, Dean Hale, and Nathan Hale's graphic novel set "Rapunzel's Revenge" (2008) and "Calamity Jack" (2010) features fractured fairy tales that take up the issue of 'the damsel in distress,' questioning and complicating traditional gender roles in fairy tales. Throughout both graphic novels Rapunzel's character…

A new model of society in post-Soviet Russia introduced novel family patterns to everyday life as well as to children's literature, with traditional parent and children's functions becoming subject to rethinking. The tendency to reconsider parental functions can be observed in texts from different genres, but it appears most overtly in modern…

The importance of stories written for young readers is undisputed, and in particular the central place of the fairy story in popular culture is clearly recognized. Whilst most of these stories are centuries old, they have been adapted by the cultures of the tellers to be more compatible with the ideological views of the audience. This article will…

This article examines the connections between posthumanism and narrative form in Philip Pullman's "Clockwork." Beginning with an account of Pullman's materialism, it argues that the novel represents consciousness and agency as emergent properties of matter, a position that manifests itself first in the tale's figurative language and later in the…

This article considers Guillermo Del Toro's "Pan's Labyrinth" as a text which utilises key codes and conventions of children's literature as a means of encountering the trauma of Fascism. The article begins by placing "Pan's Labyrinth" at a contextual crossroads involving fairy tale and a Spanish cinematic tradition and…

The Canadian young adult novel "The Maestro" by Tim Wynne-Jones foregrounds the relationship between imagination and subjective agency. While Burl uses his imagination at the beginning to protect himself from his abusive father, his fantasies become dress rehearsals for small performances that allow him to try on new identities and exercise…

Reconstructed fairy tales provide a different point of view and challenge the assumptions of a common set of values; for that reason, these stories provide a medium in which to examine power relationships in texts by applying a critical multicultural analysis (Botelho & Rudman, forthcoming, 2008, "A critical multicultural analysis of children's…

To compensate for her feelings of anger and helplessness over her mother's abandonment and subsequent displacements, the foster child Gilly Hopkins seeks power and agency through the primary means at her disposal: through the use of language and fairy tales. She constructs a Cinderella fantasy of an idealized mother who will rescue her. She also…

This essay examines the representation of adolescent girlhood, sexual violence and agency in Francesca Lia Block's contemporary fairy tale collection "The Rose and The Beast." Focusing specifically on the tale "Wolf," the author provides a literary analysis of how Block draws on and reworks traditional Western fairy tale variants to reintroduce…

This article explores how Sandra Cisneros alludes to and recasts popular fairy tales in "The House on Mango Street" to reveal their troubled legacy in the lives of many women in the novel. Drawing upon Latina feminist theory and Cisneros's autobiographical writing, this article posits that the main character Esperanza's alternative "happily ever…

This paper sketches a "map" of certain patterns in current children's fantasy. Beginning with literal maps of fantasy worlds, I point out the similarities of the physical layout of a number of invented worlds, suggesting that sameness of geography often indicates a lack of innovation in the ideological or philosophical ideas behind the stories.…