Cinderella Across Cultures: New Directions and Interdisciplinary Perspectives
Description
The Cinderella story is retold continuously in literature, illustration, music, theatre, ballet, opera, film, and other media, and folklorists have recognized hundreds of distinct forms of Cinderella plots worldwide. The focus of this volume, however, is neither Cinderella as an item of folklore nor its alleged universal meaning. In Cinderella across Cultures, editors Martine Hennard Dutheil de la Rochère, Gillian Lathey, and Monika Wozniak analyze the Cinderella tale as a fascinating, multilayered, and ever-changing story constantly reinvented in different media and traditions.
The collection highlights the tale's reception and adaptation in cultural and national contexts across the globe, including those of Italy, France, Germany, Britain, the Netherlands, Poland, and Russia. Contributors shed new light on classic versions of Cinderella by examining the material contexts that shaped them (such as the development of glass artifacts and print techniques), or by analyzing their reception in popular culture (through cheap print and mass media). The first section, "Contextualizing Cinderella," investigates the historical and cultural contexts of literary versions of the tale and their diachronic transformations. The second section, "Regendering Cinderella," tackles innovative and daring literary rewritings of the tale in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, in particular modern feminist and queer takes on the classic plot. Finally, the third section, "Visualising Cinderella," concerns symbolic transformations of the tale, especially the interaction between text and image and the renewal of the tale's iconographic tradition.
The volume offers an invaluable contribution to the study of this particular tale and also to fairy-tale studies overall. Readers interested in the visual arts, in translation studies, or in popular culture, as well as a wider audience wishing to discover the tale anew will delight in this collection.
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About the Author
Martine Hennard Dutheil de la Roch?re is professor of English and comparative literature at the University of Lausanne, Switzerland. She is the author of Reading, Translating, Rewriting: Angela Carter's Translational Poetics (Wayne State University Press, 2013).
Gillian Lathey is Senior Honorary Research Fellow at the University of Roehampton, London, where from 2004 to 2012 she was director of the National Centre for Research in Children's Literature. She is the author of The Role of Translators in Children's Literature: Invisible Storytellers and Translating Children's Literature and is co-editor with Vanessa Joosen of Grimms' Tales Around The Globe: The Dynamics of Their International Reception (Wayne State University Press, 2014). Monika Wozniak is associate professor of Polish language and literature at Sapienza University of Rome. She has published extensively in Polish, Italian, and English. She is the co-author of the Polish-language monograph Przeklady w systemie malych literatur (Translations in the System of Minor Literatures, 2014).Reviews
These lively, groundbreaking essays are based in contemporary conceptions of fairy tales as an interweaving of forms and traditions. Their approaches to such topics as the role of the translator as co-creator or the situation of any particular fairy-tale text in a local cultural and material context are insightful and intriguing.--John Stephens "emeritus professor at Macquarie University and co-author of Retelling Stories, Framing Culture "
In summary, Cinderella across Cultures abundantly lives up to the promise of its title. Furthermore, this collection proves to be a very worthy addition to the many distinguished books and journals dedicated to the study of fairy tales published by the Wayne State University Press.-- (11/28/2016)
[. . .] this most recent entry in the Wayne State series is a worthy addition to the small canon of contemporary scholarship focusing on specific tales. It is illuminating and thought-provoking reading, and an essential text for any fairy tale scholar.-- (03/13/2107)
A study of the Cinderella narrative no longer confined to folkloristics, it draws from fields as diverse as cultural and media studies, queer theory, translation studies, and museum studies.--Shilpa Menon"Bookbird: A Journal of International Children's Literature" (03/15/2017)
This collection of articles edited by Martine Hennard Dutheil de la Roch?re, Gillian Lathey, and Monika Wozniak is a testimony to the academic and interdisciplinary interest aroused not only by the tale of "Cinderella" but by the fairy tale in general -- on all continents, in all languages, and in all disciplines. It reflects the extraordinary plasticity of the genre in adapting to new media, but also in attracting new critical perspectives, whether historical, literary, cultural, or interdisciplinary.-- (08/02/2017)
Scholars will surely find this collection auspicious, not least because it is overall so well-researched and ambitious, but because the juxtaposition of old and new voices and scholarly styles is as promising a call-to-arms for the growth of single-tale studies and relevance of fairytale studies in general as could be asked for.--Margot Blankier"Western Folklore" (08/18/2017)
The eclectic essays in Cinderella across Cultures brings together an impressive collection of writers/texts/artists that plant Cinderella's feet firmly on earth in a variety of sociopolitical contexts. The bibliographies that accompany several essays will be welcome introductions to those corpuses for the uninitiated.-- (10/01/2017)
Cinderella Across Cultures: New Directions and Interdisciplinary Perspectives lives up to its title, with its greatest strength being its interdisciplinary approach and the variety of views and scholarship presented, as seen in the backgrounds and expertise of the authors, particularly their access to different cultural and linguistic perspectives.--Karra Shimabukuro"Journal of Folklore Research" (10/10/2017)
The essays in the book provide a well-rounded examination of the various forms Cinderella has taken over the centuries. From close readings of visual and filmic interpretations of Cinderella to accounts of the history and scholarship of literary and pop culture versions, this book has something for everyone. [..] Cinderella's legacy is not culturally monolithic, and thus scholarship thereon must not be either.-- (10/01/2017)
