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Author
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Comment
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Lindsey
Registered User
(11/7/04 1:16 pm)
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What has triggered the popularity of adult fairy tales?
I recently discovered this niche and have had a wonderful time exploring SurLaLune and Endicott (thank you, Heidi and Terri!) and reading Coover, Dean, Lee, Argueta, Atwood, and Card, to name a few. Although I bought Anne Sexton’s [i]Transformations[/i] in the 70’s and Emma Donoghue’s [i]Kissing the Witch[/i] in 1997, I had no idea there was a definable reading public to go along with them until I stumbled onto the Endicott site through a Google search. Since then, I’ve found adult FT’s through Amazon, through library readers’ advisory (although that really depends on the knowledge of individual librarians), and by following subject heading links in libraries’ online catalogs.
1. How do other people find the novels and how do they find out this ‘genre’ even exists?
2. What do readers look for when they read these novels and why have they become so relatively popular in the past 10-20 years?
3. Is there a study anywhere about the readers of this ‘genre’? I’ve read Bettelheim, Bacchilega, and others, but their focus is generally on the stories, not on the readers of the adult novels.
Why do I ask? I’m a library school student interested in learning how to identify people who share reading interests, especially in “new” areas like full-length adult FT’s. I’m also curious to find out how libraries and bookstores fill (or don’t fill) their needs.
Any thoughts or references are greatly appreciated.
Lindsey Meyer
Edited by: Lindsey at: 11/7/04 1:30 pm
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Veronica Schanoes
Registered User
(11/8/04 4:52 am)
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Re: What has triggered the popularity of adult fairy tales?
I can't speak for anybody else, but I stumbled upon Red as Blood when I was quite young, and just starting to read science fiction and fantasy. I loved fairy tales and read books and books of them, so the idea of revising them blew my mind. In my opinion, the publication of Carter's The Bloody Chamber triggered the contemporary flood of such revisions, and Carter's writing was intimately linked to certain debates happening in and around second-wave feminism in the 1970s that had to do with questions of sexuality, female socialization, and role models. There was a spate of feminist criticism attacking fairy tales as a genre for all the Disney-fied reasons: the only good mother is a dead mother, valorization of female passivity and "innocence," etc. I think that Carter's revisions, and other such revisions, were conscious attempts to reclaim fairy tales. It has been suggested, and I think rightfully so, that Bloody Chamber is a companion piece to Carter's analysis of Sade, pornography, and female sexuality, The Sadeian Woman.
Obviously that was 25 years ago now, and Sexton's Transformations came before Carter's book, but having looked over publication dates, etc., I think Carter was a far greater catalyst for works of this kind than Sexton.
To my knowledge, there is not yet a fairy tale equivalent of Reading the Romance, but my knowledge is not comprehensive.
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deathcookie
Registered User
(11/8/04 1:06 pm)
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my experience
I think I first "discovered" adult fairy tales when I was eighteen, and I read "Beauty" by Robin Mckinley. The idea of taking a fairy tale and turning it into a full-length novel! I was absolutely hooked.
I had always been a big fantasy reader. The Hobbit, Lord of the Rings, and a really obscure book called "A walk out of the world", were my favorites back then, and I loved movies like "Labyrinth" and "The Neverending Story". The short-lived tv series, Jim Henson's "The Storyteller", helped me to see that Fairy Tales had so much more "nitty-grittiness" than Disney Studios gave them credit for.
I lived in a small town, population 3,000, in Texas, and the library was little more than a joke, otherwise I think I would have discovered this genre far sooner. One cool thing though, I talked the librarian into giving me all their archive issues of Booklist, from about 1980-1990 before they threw them out. I pored over each issue and made huge lists of books I wanted to read, cutting out the reviews of books by Robin Mckinley, Jane Yolen, Mercedes Lackey, etc, and pasting them into my "Book" book, a scrapbook I had made for the purpose.
Anyways, that's how I did it back in the days before Amazon. Com,
:lol
Callie
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Mary
Unregistered User
(11/9/04 2:08 am)
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Angela Carter and Anne Sexton, fairy godmothers
I think Angela Carter's The Bloody Chamber and Ann Sexton's Transformations are the two works that really popularized the genre of fairy-tale re-tellings for modern readers, particularly among feminist readers and writers. In the fantasy genre it seems natural that there are many writers interested in re-telling fairy tales for adults since it is a genre heavily influenced by folklore, myth, and other older stories of the fantastic, including fairy tales. But it also seems to me that editors Ellen Datlow and Terri Windlin had a lot to do with making it as popular and widespread as it is by publishing so much of it in their various anthologies and in TW's other book series. I worked in publishing years ago (in children's books, not adult books) and I saw how much a dedicated editor influences what gets published, so I think this influence might be as important at Carter's and Sexton's.
Would feminist fairy tale re-tellings be so prevalent or popular without Carter & Sexton? Would adult fairy tales be so prevalent or popular without Windling & Datlow?
Sometimes trends happen just because the time is right for them, but usually it seems if you take a closer look you find the hard work of a handful of key people behind any trend. Just my 2 cents.
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Mary
Unregistered User
(11/9/04 2:20 am)
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literary fairy godmothers
While we're on this topic there's a question I've been wanting to ask Terri Windling, who visits this board (hello Ms Windling!):
The recent anthologies you've edited with Ellen Datlow have contained stories inspired by myth rather than by fairy tales ( such as "The Green Man and Other Tales of the Mythic Forest" and "The Faery Reel and Other Tales from the Twilight Realm"). Is this a new direction or do you and Ms. Datlow plan to publish other adult fairy tale anthologies in the future? I do like the mythic stories too and have bought and read those books with great pleasure, but adult fairy tales are my passion and so I hope more books are planned!
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Terri Windling
Registered User
(11/11/04 11:42 am)
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Re: literary fairy godmothers
I'd still like to do more adult fairy tale volumes (in the Snow White, Blood Red series), but after editing six in a row, Ellen Datlow wanted to take a little break.
In addition to our "myth" series for Viking, however, we've also published two fairy tale anthologies for younger readers: A Wolf in the Door and Swan Sister (Simon & Schuster). And it looks like we'll be doing a third volume for the same publisher.
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Laura McCaffrey
Registered User
(11/12/04 7:26 am)
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Re: literary fairy godmothers
I'd also like to add that when I was a teen reading fantasy in the 1980's, fairy tale re-tellings were often where the girls WERE in fantasy. Granted, the libraries I went to were small, as was the town I lived in. But I read all the fantasy I could get my hands on, and often the books I found were full of epic stories of boys, with maybe a good friend/future love interest, going out into the world to find himself and triumph over evil. McKinley's fairy tale re-tellings, as well as THE HERO AND THE CROWN and THE BLUE SWORD, were where I found girls - central girls - in fantasy. I hadn't known I was looking for these girls, but they meant a great deal to me once I found them.
LauraMc
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