Justice in 21st-Century Fairy Tales and the Power of Wonder

(Hardback)

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Exploring a range of international works such as films, streaming television series, graphic novels, and picture books, this open access book interrogates how, and to what extent, fairy tales are put to work for justice in the areas of environment and ecology, kinship and family, ability and disability, and sex and gender. As Bacchilega and Greenhill demonstrate, some 21st-century fairy tales channel the genres wonder to offer otherwise possibilities for being and acting in the world that are not confined to socially sanctioned paths. Drawing on visual and audio-visual case studies of texts such as The Magic Fish, Julin Is A Mermaid, Pokot [Spoor], Grns [Border], The Dragon Prince, Gatta Cenerentola [Cinderella the Cat], and Sweet Tooth, they examine how the wonder and preternatural of fairy tales model a sustained desire to believe in and realize new ways of existence that have often been too easily dismissed. Guided by theories in fields including ecological, gender, disability, critical race, Indigenous, fantasy, posthuman, and adaptation studies as they intersect with folklore and fairy tale studies, this book examines how creators of wonder tales since the beginning of the new millennium have presented provocations around humans political and social relations with nature and culture. Analyzing justice from a variety of positions and establishing how tales of the otherwise can develop optative thinking, Justice and the Power of Wonder in 21st-Century Fairy Tales reclaims wonder from Disneyfication' and the defining narrative of the genre as necessarily conservative, patriarchal, and merely nostalgic. The eBook editions of this book are available open access under a CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 licence on bloomsburycollections.com. Open access was funded by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada grant 435-2019-0691 and The University of Winnipeg, Canada.

Author Bio

Cristina Bacchilega is Professor Emerita of English at the University of Hawaii-Manoa, USA. Her recent works include Inviting Interruptions: Wonder Tales in the 21st Century, coedited with Jennifer Orme (2021), Fairy Tales Transformed: Twenty-First-Century Adaptations and the Politics of Wonder (2013), and publications in Journal of the Fantastic in the Arts and Marvels & Tales: Journal of Fairy-Tale Studies, of which she is co-editor. Pauline Greenhill is Professor of Womens and Gender Studies at the University of Winnipeg, Canada. She has received grants from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada. Her publications include The Routledge Companion to Media and Fairy-Tale Cultures, co-edited with Jill Terry Rudy, Naomi Hamer, and Lauren Bosc (2018), and essays in Signs, parallax, Theoretical Criminology, Studies in European Cinema, and Law, Culture and the Humanities.