Browsing by Author "Marais, Adri"

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    Ever other : unsettling subjects in contemporary revisions of fairy tales
    (Stellenbosch : Stellenbosch University, 2017-12) Marais, Adri; Steiner, Tina; Viljoen, Shaun; Stellenbosch University. Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences. Dept. of English.
    ENGLISH ABSTRACT: Fairy tales create some of the first and most lasting impressions on young minds. In the formative years, they shape world-views, self-perceptions and opinions of ‘others’ in ways that persist into adulthood. Acknowledging that these presumably innocent stories are of greater social significance than is generally recognised, I am interested in contemporary revisions of the classic fairy tales widely critiqued by ‘second wave’ feminists for the restrictive gender expectations they prescribe. And yet, while it remains located in a larger area of scholarship that can be defined as revisionist feminist fiction, this dissertation focuses on revisions of classic fairy tales published after 1990 – effectively ‘after Angela Carter’ and her generation’s focus on voiceless and disempowered female characters during the sixties, seventies and eighties. My premise is that these post-1990 adaptations have moved beyond the white, middle-aged and heterosexual concerns of ‘second wave’ feminism, broadening their scope to include non-normative interests and counterhegemonic world views as reflected by ‘third wave’ feminism. As such, these texts have taken on the insights of postcolonial and queer theory as well as ageing studies in order to explore how race, age and sexual orientation or gender identity intersect with gender and sex to create marginal subjects or ‘others’. While I acknowledge all ten texts as feminist revisions, I also identify three new areas of difference that intersect with sex and/or gender to create marginalised and misrepresented black, ageing and queer ‘others’. I read Helen Oyeyemi’s Boy, Snow, Bird (2014), Nalo Hopkinson’s “The Glass Bottle Trick” (2001) and Shaida Kazie Ali’s Not a Fairytale (2010) as post-colonial revisions critical of the white ideal and Eurocentric discourses implicit in certain classic fairy tales. Considering a second tale from Hopkinson’s Skin Folk anthology titled “Riding the Red”, together with Terry Pratchett’s Witches Abroad (1991) and Dubravka Ugresic’s Baba Yaga Laid an Egg (2007), I explore how they both underscore and problematise the ageism inherent in these classics, unsettling the glib and tired generalisations that fairy tales make about older women. Finally, I consider Malinda Lo’s Ash (2009), Wesley Stace’s Misfortune (2006) and Emma Donoghue’s “The Tale of the Shoe” and “The Tale of the Witch”, both from the Kissing the Witch collection (1997), as queer retellings that centre around unconventional gender identities and non-normative sexuality which, by association, encourage readers to recognise the binary gender roles, compulsory heterosexuality and cisnormativity espoused by the most popularly read and repeated fairy tales. Although I primarily make use of the term ‘revision’, my study also employs synonyms like ‘rewriting’, ‘retelling’, ‘recasting’ and ‘counter-narrative’ to describe what it considers to be a literary act of confrontation, disruption and reinvention. As I engage in their comparative close reading, I explore the ways in which these contemporary revisions of fairy tales unsettle and renew convention instead of simply reproducing it. Ultimately I consider how they build on and move beyond the feminist revisions of the previous century in order to confront new and different sites of othering that hold potential for literary liberation.