This book includes a selection of talks from the international conference, “Re-Orienting the Fairy Tale: Contemporary Fairy-Tale Adaptions across Cultures,” held at Kanagawa University (Yokohama, Japan) on March 29-30, 2017. The premises of the conference are explained in the introduction by the editors of this volume. They claim, without being very specific, that “when it comes to mapping the fairy-tale genre on a global scale, scholars are still confronted with a long consolidated critical tradition that tends to subordinate Asian, African, and other ‘peripheral’ narratives to a Western viewpoint. In analyses lacking both specificity and depth, Euro-American ideological, methodological, and cultural frames have long been imposed upon fairy tales and fairy-tale adaptations from other cultures, thus overlooking the importance of the environment in which these narratives are produced” (3).

The book is divided into three parts: 1) Disorienting Cultural Assumptions; 2) Exploring New Uses; 3) Promoting Alternative Ethics and Aesthetics. In Part I, there are four essays, Cristina Bacchilega’s “Fairy Tales in Site: Wonders of Disorientation. Challenges of Re-Orientation”; Ku’ualoha Ho’omanawanui’s “Mo’oleloKamaha’ 2.0: The Art of Politics of the Modern Hawaiian Wonder Tale”; Roxanne Hughes’s “Re-Orienting China and America: Yeh-Shen: A Cinderella Story from China and Its TV Adaptation”; Natsumi Ikoma’s “Monstrous Marionette: The Tale of a Japanese Doll by Angela Carter.” Bacchilega’s talk is a fascinating meditation that focuses on provocative contemporary works by Sofia Samatar, Su Blackwell, Toni Morrison, and Neil Gaiman, and how the fantastical approach to reality re-orients our views about injustices and problematic aspects of racism, sexism, colonialism, etc. Ho’omanawanui shifts our attention to the oral traditions in Hawaii and how they have been exploited and adapted to further colonialist interests. Hughes, too, is interested in the exploitation and transformation of the oral ninth-century folk tale, “Yexian Tale,” as a children’s story that was also adapted for television. Loss of the original meaning involves also a loss of ethnic identity. Disorientation destroys the significance of tradition. Ikoma’s original and acute re-interpretation of Angela Carter’s “The Loves of a Lady Purple” explores how her unusual story was influenced by ancient Japanese culture. In this respect Ikoma demonstrates how diverse cultural interaction can engage in a deeper exploration of other cultures.

In Part II, the essays critically examine innovative uses of fairy tales in contemporary cultures for education and entertainment for both adults and children. There are five essays that introduce unusual experiments with folk and fairy tales: Hatsue Nakawaki, “Japanese Heroine Tales and the Significance of Storytelling in Contemporary Society”; Shuli Barzilai, “Who’s Afraid of Derrida & Co? Modern Theory Meets Three Little Pigs in the Classroom”; Aleksandra Szugajew, “Adults Reclaiming Fairy tales through Cinema: Popular Fairy Tale Movie Adaptations from the Past Decade”; Nieves Moreno Redondo, “Trespassing the Boundaries of Fairy Tales: Pablo Berger’s Silent Film Snow White.” Nakawaki demonstrates how important it is to re-evaluate traditional fairy tales with regard to gender roles in storytelling for children. Barzilai focuses more on university students and shows how different versions of the same folktale can be used as pedagogical “tools” to reflect critically on literary theory and socio-cultural conditions. Szugajew discusses Hollywood live-action fairy-tale films and how they have been adapted and have become more international, thus reflecting upon diverse cultural and socio-political concerns throughout the world. As an example of such changes, Redondo concentrates on just one provocative film, Pablo Berger’s Snow White, to criticize the stereotypical portrayal of gender in other filmic interpretations of the folk tale.

In Part III the essays explore alternative ethics, and there are six essays that explore exciting innovative approaches to fairy tales: Vanessa Joosen, “Re-Orienting the Fairy Tale, Revising Age?”; Michael Brodski, “Re-Orienting Fairy-Tale Childhood: Child Protagonists as Critical Signifiers of Fairy-Tale Tropes in Transnational Contemporary Cinema”; Lucy Fraser, “Alice on the Edge: Girls’ Culture and ‘Western’ Fairy Tales in Japan”; Masafumi Monden, “Magical Bird Maidens: Reconsidering Romantic Fairy Tales in Japanese Popular Culture”; Katsuhiko Suganuma, “When Princess(es) Will Sing: Girls Rock and Alternative Queer Interpretation”; Daniela Kato, “The Plantation, the Garden, and the Forest: Biocultural Borderlands in Angela Carter’s ‘Penetrating to the Heart of the Forest.’” Joosen develops a highly insightful analysis of age studies in relation to traditional folk and fairy tales in different countries, and shows ways to avoid ageist stereotypes. Brodski shifts gears to examine live-action transnational films involving childhood, and uses significant studies in his acute critical analysis to show how fairy-tale adaptations can enable us to comprehend and critique the different ways we socialize children. Fraser’s essay can be linked to Brodski’s paper as she analyzes the way that Lewis Carroll’s Alice books have been received and adapted in Japan, especially how a “foreign” cultural context can lend new meaning to Euro-American stories. Monden’s paper is perfect proof of how one culture can reveal new insights into Euro-Western folk and fairy tales by showing how Japanese culture (specifically the Japanese anime series) can offer different interpretations of the romantic fairy-tale genre. Suganuma also turns to Japanese popular culture to show how popular music (namely the Japanese female band Princess Princess) can be an unlikely but highly useful medium to analyze the adaptation and re-orientation of fairy-tale studies. Appropriately for the general purposes of this book, Kato focuses on Angela Carter’s story, “Penetrating to the Heart of the Forest,” to argue most succinctly and comprehensively for an ecological re-orientation by engaging with the insights of multispecies feminist theories.

This is a large and wordy book and at times frustrating because of the politically correct, somewhat bureaucratic theoretical language some of the authors use. However, every single essay in this volume is worth reading if the contemporary critical theory and history of folklore and fairy-tale studies is to continue along a trajectory begun after World War II. Most organizations, societies, and journals, which might have been politically and ideologically conservative forty years ago, have expanded their horizons and opened their doors to young scholars who, as in this book, have engaged in the cultural wars and embraced many of the so-called re-orientations of folklore and fairy-tale studies. This book is therefore more another landmark rather than a reorientation, and it signals how important it is to plunge forward with multi-theoretical critical and historical approaches to folk and fairy tales.

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[Review length: 1037 words • Review posted on December 10, 2020]