Fairy Tale Review

The Blue Issue is the inaugural issue of Fairy Tale Review. Swiss scholar Max Luthi wrote about fairy tales as literary examples of abstract art. The strange quality that Luthi identifies as “firm form” is sparse, flat and depthless as it is wild, weightless and bright. The writing selected for the debut issue of Fairy Tale Review reflects this quality in a multitude of ways. The work in here is not beholden to any particular school of writing. Rather, each contribution uniquely dovetails with the aesthetics and motifs of fairy tales.

The sheer volume of responses to the first issue of Fairy Tale Review shows that fairy tales continue to be one of the most viable art forms. In fairy tales, all things are interdependent, mysteriously and insanely entwined. They contain a deeply ecological world. The Green Issue is devoted to new fairy tales, with a special consideration for nature. The unbridled individualism at work in the literary forms most dominant today devalues the natural world in relation to the human. In fairy tales, the human world and the animal world are collapsed. The collapse remains open to wonder and change. In this way, fairy tales provide the possibility for narratives to shine a different sort of terrible light on the natural world. This world is transparent, imperiled, abstract, and new. In this world, clarity and wonder go hand and hand.

This issue is themed around yellow: the color of my skin, my namesake, the color used to describe four billion plus Asians, and this doesn’t even account for the diasporic population. Yellow, the color of diseased skin and diseased people. Yellow, the color of aging. All these denigrations contained in one color, none of which actually resemble the color itself. Because yellow is bright. It is electric. It inspires. And the works in this issue are as effulgent as yellow itself, but lurking—as yellow always lurks—is something sinister and bold, the color forcing itself up and out, revealing, transforming. Yellow yields metamorphosis.

Fairy Tale Review is an annual literary publication dedicated to publishing new fairy-tale fiction, nonfiction, and poetry. It seeks to expand the conversation about fairy tales among practitioners, scholars, and general readers. Contents reflect a diverse spectrum of literary artists working with fairy tales in many languages and styles. In the Emerald Issue, new stories, poems, essays, and artwork is inspired by the themes of "emeralds" and "Oz". In Frank L. Baum's introduction to The Wonderful Wizard of Oz, the author indicates that his story "aspires to being a modernized fairy tale" in opposition to the "historical" stories with all their "horrible and blood-curling incident".

From Cinderella to comic con to colonialism and more, this companion provides readers with a comprehensive and current guide to the fantastic, uncanny, and wonderful worlds of the fairy tale across media and cultures. It offers a clear, detailed, and expansive overview of contemporary themes and issues throughout the intersections of the fields of fairy-tale studies, media studies, and cultural studies, addressing, among others, issues of reception, audience cultures, ideology, remediation, and adaptation. Examples and case studies are drawn from a wide range of pertinent disciplines and settings, providing thorough, accessible treatment of central topics and specific media from around the globe.

“At an early age, children are weaned on the marvelous, and later on they fail to retain a sufficient virginity of mind to enjoy fairy tales,” Andre Breton wrote in 1924. “There are fairy tales to be written for adults,” he continued. “Fairy tales almost blue.” Violet flowers are often described as “almost-blue,” which is how this color was chosen. This issue of Fairy Tale Review focuses on fairy tales for adults.

Like all fairy tales, the story of Little Red gets strength from its multitudes. It is a moving hive, a travelling pack of translations and interpretations too numerous to catalogue. It manages to examine our most salient tropes in binaries, and the equators formed in this contrast are tangential contradictions: The tale is at once innocent and sexual. It mingles the vulnerable with the predatory, and overlaps captivity with freedom. It is both fable and fairy tale, and a horror story to boot: a naïve individual walking into a den of trickery. Then comes that eerie, parsed-out realization when our girl comes to terms with what the readers have known all along: things are not as they seem. What a fright, when something categorized as safe becomes compromised and inverted, when the familiar is replaced with the unknown. In this issue, we add new footprints to the path through the woods. Some of these pieces retell the tale; others explore its place in our minds and our culture.

Every script can become an entire class production by using the “group readings” or the scripts can be used successfully with small groups. Reading levels are provided for every story character and the group readings, allowing the teacher to assign roles according to individual reading abilities. Includes prop and costume suggestions, activities, resource guide, and sound effects audio CD. Supports NCTE standards.

The Translucent Issue is a break from tradition. In some ways, colors are an easier, more obvious entry point into the world of fairy tales. It is not transparent, and thus never explicit on the page—the Brothers Grimm rarely editorialized—but then again psychology is rarely explicit. It is a partial view, one that permits shape and light, but not clarity, not exactness; it is a half-truth, one that includes what is as often as it includes what could be; it is the fantasy of wish, and the dubious luxury of pretense. Fairy-tale psychology is not clarified through the use of interiority or analysis, but by situation, circumstance. It is illuminated by what is seen and, just as importantly, what is not.

Responding to thirty years of feminist fairy-tale scholarship, this book breaks new ground by rethinking important questions, advocating innovative approaches, and introducing woman-centered texts and traditions that have been ignored for too long.

Contemporary Fairy-Tale Magic studies the impact of fairy tales on contemporary cultures from an interdisciplinary perspective, with special emphasis on how literature and film are retelling classic fairy tales for modern audiences.

Jason Vanderholt, Hollywood's hottest actor, falls head over heels for everygirl, Chloe Winters, who hasn't gotten around to watching most of his movies. She becomes the woman every other woman in America is dying to be, but it just isn't her fairytale.

In this, the first collection of essays to address the development of fairy tale film as a genre, Pauline Greenhill and Sidney Eve Matrix stress, "the mirror of fairy-tale film reflects not so much what its audience members actually are but how they see themselves and their potential to develop (or, likewise, to regress)." As Jack Zipes says further in the foreword, “Folk and fairy tales pervade our lives constantly through television soap operas and commercials, in comic books and cartoons, in school plays and storytelling performances, in our superstitions and prayers for miracles, and in our dreams and daydreams. The artistic re-creations of fairy-tale plots and characters in film—the parodies, the aesthetic experimentation, and the mixing of genres to engender new insights into art and life—mirror possibilities of estranging ourselves from designated roles, along with the conventional patterns of the classical tales.” Here, scholars from film, folklore, and cultural studies move discussion beyond the well-known Disney movies to the many other filmic adaptations of fairy tales and to the widespread use of fairy tale tropes, themes, and motifs in cinema.

Sue Short examines how fairy tale tropes have been reworked in contemporary film, identifying familiar themes in a range of genres – including rom coms, crime films and horror – and noting key similarities and differences between the source narratives and their offspring.

Fairy Tale Review is an annual journal devoted to fairy tales, contemporary and historical. Each issue contains poetry, fiction, and essays that either address the abiding influence of fairy tales or are themselves contemporary fairy tales in prose or verse. It is, according to editor Kate Bernheimer, "a venue for all writers working with the aesthetics and motifs of fairy tales." Contributors to Fairy Tale Review: The Green Issue include: Brian Baldi, Jeanne Marie Beaumont, Jedediah Berry, Paula Bohince, Wendy Brenner, Ayse Papatya Bucak, Rikki Ducornet, Johannes Goransson, Ann Jaderlund, Dan.