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Severed Limbs and Monstrous Appetites: (Re)Defining Fairy-Tale Horror from the...
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Severed Limbs and Monstrous Appetites: (Re)Defining Fairy-Tale Horror from the Seventeenth Century to the Present

A special issue of Literature (ISSN 2410-9789).

Deadline for manuscript submissions: closed (30 April 2023) | Viewed by 25363

Special Issue Editors

Prof. Dr. Laura Tosi

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Guest Editor
Department of Linguistics and Comparative Cultural Studies, Ca’ Foscari University of Venice, Venice, Italy
Interests: British children’s literature; fairy tales; adaptation; literary fantasy; Victorian culture; gender and sexuality; early modern drama and Shakespeare
Dr. Alessandro Cabiati

E-Mail Website
Guest Editor
1. Department of Linguistics and Comparative Cultural Studies, Ca’ Foscari University of Venice, Venice, Italy
2. Department of French and Francophone Studies, Brown University, Providence, RI, USA
Interests: comparative literature; French and Anglo-American literature; fairy-tale studies; fantastic and Gothic literature; decadence and modernity; deviance and monstrosity; history of psychiatry

Special Issue Information

Dear Colleagues,

In a Christmas 2017 interview for the British magazine Fortean Times, celebrated Mexican filmmaker Guillermo Del Toro described ‘Hansel and Gretel’, ‘the original Cinderella’, and ‘Little Red Riding Hood’ as ‘a horror story’, before affirming that, in his opinion, ‘horror and the fairy tale walk hand in hand’. This statement is hardly surprising coming from a director whose oeuvre includes such films as Pan’s Labyrinth (2006) and The Shape of Water (2017), which strive to merge fairy-tale and horror themes, motifs, and imagery. Contemporary cinema and literature have frequently combined fairy-tale and horror elements, introducing twentieth-century horror visuals into fairy-tale narratives and reinterpreting characters and settings of the fairy-tale tradition through a horror lens. Examples include Gothic retellings of the ‘Snow White’ story, such as Michael Cohn’s Snow White: A Tale of Terror (1997), or the various horror adaptations of ‘Hansel and Gretel’, including Pil-Sung Yim’s film Hansel and Gretel (2007). Similarly popular has been the transformation of Little Red Riding Hood’s wolf into a werewolf, featuring in Angela Carter’s short stories ‘The Werewolf’ and ‘The Company of Wolves’—part of her collection The Bloody Chamber and Other Stories (1979), which reworks classic fairy tales from a Gothic horror perspective—but also in Catherine Hardwicke’s 2011 film Red Riding Hood.

If horror and the fairy tale are so easily intermingled, can horror then be considered as a distinctive feature of the literary fairy tale? In ‘Bluebeard’ (1697), after all, Perrault creates an atmosphere of mystery and expectation of violence before describing Bluebeard’s closet, which contains the numerous corpses of his murdered wives, whose clotted blood covers the floor. Blood, bodily mutilation, and body parts are in fact extensively represented in fairy tales. Before Disney’s sanitized film adaptations, tales such as the Grimm’s versions of ‘Cinderella’ and ‘Snow White’ (1812) depicted horrific images, such as severed limbs, cannibalism, and other types of bodily violence. As far as cannibalism is concerned, the Grimm’s ‘Hansel and Gretel’ and Perrault’s ‘Le Petit Poucet’ are among the most famous stories, but cannibalistic acts or desires are also central in lesser-known tales, such as Perrault’s version of ‘Sleeping Beauty’ or the Grimm’s ‘The Juniper Tree’.

What are the roles, functions, and meanings of horror in a fairy-tale narrative? This Special Issue of Literature aims to answer this question, inviting proposals for essays that consider, but are not limited to, the following topics:

  • The evolution of fairy-tale horror in its various forms and iterations, from the seventeenth century to the present;
  • The contemporary questioning of the boundaries between the genres of fairy tale and horror and its theoretical implications;
  • The moralistic and/or educational purposes of horror scenes in fairy tales (the horrors of a transgressive act and its violent punishment);
  • The subversion of traditional morals and happy endings in horror retellings of fairy tales;
  • Nineteenth-, twentieth-, and twenty-first-century Gothic and horror adaptations of literary fairy tales, in literature as well as in other media (cinema, theatre, TV, comics, and video games);
  • Literary experimentation and the interaction of fairy-tale and horror elements in Romanticism, Decadence, modernism, and postmodernism;
  • Fairy-tale monsters (such as ogres, witches, and cannibals) in the horror tradition;
  • Freud’s concept of the ‘uncanny’ and its possible applications in the study of fairy-tale horror;
  • The transformation of anthropomorphic animals of fairy tales into (post)human characters (for instance, wolves into werewolves);
  • The interplay between psychological terrors and visual horrors in the fairy-tale tradition.

Please send a proposal of around 500 words, along with a biographical note, to both guest editors by 30 November 2022. Full papers are due on 30 April 2023.

Prospective contributors are also invited to read the following critical works before submission:

Armitt, Lucy, ‘Gothic Fairy-Tale’, in The Handbook of the Gothic, ed. Marie Mulvey-Roberts (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009), p. 135.

Bacchilega, Cristina, Fairy Tales Transformed? Twenty-First-Century Adaptations and the Politics of Wonder (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 2013).

Hubner, Laura, Fairytale and Gothic Horror: Uncanny Transformations in Film (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2018).

Piatti-Farnell, Lorna, ‘Blood Flows Freely: The Horror of Classic Fairy Tales’, in The Palgrave Handbook to Horror Literature, ed. by Kevin Corstorphine and Laura R. Kremmel (Cham: Palgrave Macmillan, 2018), pp. 91-100.

Tatar, Maria, ‘Table Matters: Cannibalism and Oral Greed’, in Off with Their Heads! Fairytales and the Culture of Childhood (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1992), pp. 190-211.

We look forward to receiving your contributions.

Prof. Dr. Laura Tosi 
Dr. Alessandro Cabiati
Guest Editors

Manuscript Submission Information

Manuscripts should be submitted online at www.mdpi.com by registering and logging in to this website. Once you are registered, click here to go to the submission form. Manuscripts can be submitted until the deadline. All submissions that pass pre-check are peer-reviewed. Accepted papers will be published continuously in the journal (as soon as accepted) and will be listed together on the special issue website. Research articles, review articles as well as short communications are invited. For planned papers, a title and short abstract (about 100 words) can be sent to the Editorial Office for announcement on this website.

Submitted manuscripts should not have been published previously, nor be under consideration for publication elsewhere (except conference proceedings papers). All manuscripts are thoroughly refereed through a double-blind peer-review process. A guide for authors and other relevant information for submission of manuscripts is available on the Instructions for Authors page. Literature is an international peer-reviewed open access quarterly journal published by MDPI.

Please visit the Instructions for Authors page before submitting a manuscript. The Article Processing Charge (APC) for publication in this open access journal is 1000 CHF (Swiss Francs). Submitted papers should be well formatted and use good English. Authors may use MDPI's English editing service prior to publication or during author revisions.

Keywords

  • fairy tale
  • horror
  • terror
  • monsters
  • the Gothic genre
  • werewolves
  • Grimm
  • Perrault
  • cannibalism
  • mutilation

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Published Papers (7 papers)

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Editorial

Jump to: Research

9 pages, 207 KiB  
Editorial
Introduction: Fairy Tales and Other Horrors
by Laura Tosi and Alessandro Cabiati
Literature 2024, 4(1), 22-30; https://doi.org/10.3390/literature4010002 - 25 Dec 2023
Viewed by 2342
Abstract
In a Christmas 2017 interview with the British magazine Fortean Times, the celebrated Mexican filmmaker Guillermo del Toro described ‘Hansel and Gretel’, ‘the original Cinderella’, and ‘Little Red Riding Hood’ as ‘a horror story’, before affirming that ‘horror [...] Read more.
In a Christmas 2017 interview with the British magazine Fortean Times, the celebrated Mexican filmmaker Guillermo del Toro described ‘Hansel and Gretel’, ‘the original Cinderella’, and ‘Little Red Riding Hood’ as ‘a horror story’, before affirming that ‘horror and the fairy tale walk hand in hand’ (del Toro 2017, p [...] Full article
(This article belongs to the Special Issue Severed Limbs and Monstrous Appetites: (Re)Defining Fairy-Tale Horror from the Seventeenth Century to the Present)

Research

Jump to: Editorial

21 pages, 366 KiB  
Article
The Devil’s Marriage: Folk Horror and the Merveilleux Louisianais
by Ryan Atticus Doherty
Literature 2024, 4(1), 1-21; https://doi.org/10.3390/literature4010001 - 22 Dec 2023
Viewed by 1640
Abstract
At the beginning of his Creole opus The Grandissimes, George Washington Cable refers to Louisiana as “A land hung in mourning, darkened by gigantic cypresses, submerged; a land of reptiles, silence, shadow, decay”. This anti-pastoral view of Louisiana as an ecosystem of horrific [...] Read more.
At the beginning of his Creole opus The Grandissimes, George Washington Cable refers to Louisiana as “A land hung in mourning, darkened by gigantic cypresses, submerged; a land of reptiles, silence, shadow, decay”. This anti-pastoral view of Louisiana as an ecosystem of horrific nature and the very human melancholy it breeds is one that has persisted in popular American culture to the present day. However, the literature of Louisiana itself is marked by its creativity in blending elements of folktales, fairy tales, and local color. This paper proposes to examine the transhuman, or the transcendence of the natural by means of supernatural transformation, in folk horror tales of Louisiana. As the locus where the fairy tale meets the burgeoning Southern Gothic, these tales revolve around a reworking of what Vladimir Propp refers to as transfiguration, the physical and metaphysical alteration of the human into something beyond the human. The focus of this paper will be on three recurring figures in Louisiana folk horror: yellow fever, voodoo, and the Devil. Drawing upon works including Alcée Fortier’s collection of Creole folktales Louisiana Folktales (1895), Dr. Alfred Mercier’s “1878”, and various newspaper tales of voodoo ceremonies from the ante- and post-bellum periods, this article brings together theorizations about the fairy tale from Vladimir Propp and Jack Zipes and historiological approaches to the Southern Gothic genre to demonstrate that Louisiana, in its multilingual literary traditions, serves as a nexus where both genres blend uncannily together to create tales that are both geographically specific and yet exist outside of the historical time of non-fantastic fiction. Each of these figures, yellow fever, voodoo, and the Devil, challenges the expectations of what limits the human. Thus, this paper seeks to examine what will be termed the “Louisiana gothic”, a particular blend of fairy-tale timelessness, local color, and the transfiguration of the human. Ultimately, the Louisiana gothic, as expressed in French, English, and Creole, tends toward a view of society in decay, mobilizing these elements of horror and of fairy tales to comment on a society that, after the revolution in Saint-Domingue, the Louisiana Purchase, and the Civil War, was seen as falling into inevitable decline. This commentary on societal decay, expressed through elements of folk horror, sets apart Louisiana gothic as a distinct subgenre that challenges conventions about the structures and functions of the fairy tale. Full article
(This article belongs to the Special Issue Severed Limbs and Monstrous Appetites: (Re)Defining Fairy-Tale Horror from the Seventeenth Century to the Present)
16 pages, 306 KiB  
Article
Fairy Tale Sources and Rural Settings in Dario Argento’s Supernatural Horror
by Peter Vorissis
Literature 2023, 3(4), 457-472; https://doi.org/10.3390/literature3040031 - 28 Nov 2023
Viewed by 1831
Abstract
This article examines three of Dario Argento’s supernatural horror films (Suspiria, Phenomena, and Dark Glasses) and their use of fairy tale imagery and narratives, which distinguishes them from murder-mystery-oriented giallo films. In them, Argento locates his characters, rather than in [...] Read more.
This article examines three of Dario Argento’s supernatural horror films (Suspiria, Phenomena, and Dark Glasses) and their use of fairy tale imagery and narratives, which distinguishes them from murder-mystery-oriented giallo films. In them, Argento locates his characters, rather than in urban environments, in rural spaces (forests, fields, mountains) where the supernatural elements of their stories blossom. Suspiria represents a primarily aesthetic exploration of parallels between fairy tales and contemporary horror, while Phenomena uses these two modes to examine the conflict between the rational and irrational, the natural and the supernatural. Dark Glasses initially appears to be one of his more traditional gialli, but it abandons these tropes with a simplified plot evoking the story of “Little Red Riding Hood”; this shift is accomplished by moving the action of the film out of Rome and into the dark forests of the countryside. Dark Glasses, I argue, therefore represents a self-conscious move to unite in a single film the two major strands of Argento’s filmography and to expose some fundamental elements of his general cinematic approach—namely, the unique capacity of stylized aesthetics and irrational elements to convey the experience of very real, human terror and evil. Full article
(This article belongs to the Special Issue Severed Limbs and Monstrous Appetites: (Re)Defining Fairy-Tale Horror from the Seventeenth Century to the Present)
16 pages, 287 KiB  
Article
Gothic Fairy-Tale Feminism: The Rise of Eyre/‘Error’
by Aileen Miyuki Farrar
Literature 2023, 3(4), 430-445; https://doi.org/10.3390/literature3040029 - 31 Oct 2023
Viewed by 2236
Abstract
The ways Gothic fairy tales and fairy-tale feminism interact are not always clear. An undercurrent of feminist studies of fairy tales is fueled by the 1970s Lurie-Lieberman debate, which focused on the question of whether fairy tales liberate or repress women. Meanwhile, critics [...] Read more.
The ways Gothic fairy tales and fairy-tale feminism interact are not always clear. An undercurrent of feminist studies of fairy tales is fueled by the 1970s Lurie-Lieberman debate, which focused on the question of whether fairy tales liberate or repress women. Meanwhile, critics such as Lorna Piatti-Farnell and Lucie Armitt have offered studies of the interplay between Gothic horror and fairy tales. However, these studies have limits, often emphasizing the violence, self-mutilation, and cannibalism of women, like those in Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm’s versions of “Cinderella” and “Snow White”. This paper argues that “Rapunzel” (1812) is key for understanding the Gothic and feminist discourses of Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre (1847). Firstly, this paper argues that a self-reflexive and self-productive relationship between subjectivity and desire shapes and disrupts the Gothic, fairy-tale, and feminist discourses of Jane Eyre, resulting in a specular feminine-I that has inspired pluralistic readings of the text. Secondly, an analysis of the Rapunzelian metaphors of ‘wicked’ hunger and ideological towers unmasks the double consciousness that not only fetters feminine subjectivity but delimits the domestic structures of marriage and home. Multiplying the ways nineteenth-century Gothicism, fairy tales, and feminism may interact, Brontë’s specular study of feminine desire makes way for a productive and agential feminine speaking-I. Full article
(This article belongs to the Special Issue Severed Limbs and Monstrous Appetites: (Re)Defining Fairy-Tale Horror from the Seventeenth Century to the Present)
14 pages, 310 KiB  
Article
All the Better to Eat You with: Sexuality, Violence, and Disgust in ‘Little Red Riding Hood’ Adaptations
by Nicola Welsh-Burke
Literature 2023, 3(4), 416-429; https://doi.org/10.3390/literature3040028 - 30 Oct 2023
Viewed by 5119
Abstract
In this paper I explore how fears of incorporation, sexual violence, permeability and ‘leakiness’ and metaphorical and literal villains are negotiated within the contemporary fairy tale retelling tradition. Through the close reading and comparative analysis of two twenty-first century Young Adult (YA) retellings [...] Read more.
In this paper I explore how fears of incorporation, sexual violence, permeability and ‘leakiness’ and metaphorical and literal villains are negotiated within the contemporary fairy tale retelling tradition. Through the close reading and comparative analysis of two twenty-first century Young Adult (YA) retellings of ‘Little Red Riding Hood’ from the 2010s (Sisters Red by Jackson Pearce and Elana K. Arnold’s Red Hood), I argue that this representation and negotiation of sexual, violent, and gustatory appetites is made possible due to the intersection of the fairy tale, horror, and YA genres, creating a unique space in which the lycanthropic and human figures are sources of dread and intrigue and the terrifying and absurd. In doing so, I argue that this contemporary tradition continues the well-established narrative of the fairy tale as a site of simultaneous high dramatics and interrogation of the everyday. Full article
(This article belongs to the Special Issue Severed Limbs and Monstrous Appetites: (Re)Defining Fairy-Tale Horror from the Seventeenth Century to the Present)
15 pages, 274 KiB  
Article
Facing Your Fears: Navigating Social Anxieties and Difference in Contemporary Fairy Tales
by Dorothea Trotter
Literature 2023, 3(3), 342-356; https://doi.org/10.3390/literature3030023 - 4 Sep 2023
Viewed by 2635
Abstract
In the 20th and 21st centuries, the rise of audio-visual media, particularly cinema and television, brought about new visual techniques and storytelling conventions that have transformed the way fairy tales are adapted for the screen. Initially adapted for a younger audience, newer adaptations [...] Read more.
In the 20th and 21st centuries, the rise of audio-visual media, particularly cinema and television, brought about new visual techniques and storytelling conventions that have transformed the way fairy tales are adapted for the screen. Initially adapted for a younger audience, newer adaptations often return to the darker and more horrific elements of the source texts; this includes body horror and an emphasis on physiological differences. This article employs structural, cultural, and folkloric interpretive lenses for the analysis of three contemporary, audio-visual fairy tales to discuss the way contemporary fairy tales include disability and difference as social constructs that are shaped by cultural attitudes and anxieties. The stories’ plots are driven by the protagonists’ “otherness”, and these texts feature transformations that provide clues to understanding current standards of beauty and normality. I argue that newer adaptations place an emphasis on finding resolutions to difference that challenge the traditional idea that if one has a face or body that strays from the standard of the norm, one must die, relegate oneself to the margins, or join others like oneself. Full article
(This article belongs to the Special Issue Severed Limbs and Monstrous Appetites: (Re)Defining Fairy-Tale Horror from the Seventeenth Century to the Present)
15 pages, 312 KiB  
Article
The Tales of Bluebeard’s Wives: Carmen Maria Machado’s Intertextual Storytelling in In the Dream House and “The Husband Stitch”
by Carolin Jesussek
Literature 2023, 3(3), 327-341; https://doi.org/10.3390/literature3030022 - 30 Aug 2023
Cited by 1 | Viewed by 4654
Abstract
This paper examines the gothic fairy tale in Carmen Maria Machado’s memoir In the Dream House and short story “The Husband Stitch” with a focus on Bluebeard’s insistent presence and the interweaving of reality, gothic horror, and fairy tale. In the memoir, Machado [...] Read more.
This paper examines the gothic fairy tale in Carmen Maria Machado’s memoir In the Dream House and short story “The Husband Stitch” with a focus on Bluebeard’s insistent presence and the interweaving of reality, gothic horror, and fairy tale. In the memoir, Machado restages her experience of queer intimate partner violence in the form of a gothic fairy tale as “The Queen and the Squid”, reminiscent of the tale of Bluebeard’s latest wife. By including gothic fairy-tale elements in the autobiographical text, Machado blurs the boundaries between the fictional and non-fictional realm, between her story and that of Bluebeard’s latest wife, thereby rewriting the tale for a queer context. The annotation of the memoir using Stith Thompson’s Motif-Index of Folk-Literature further superimposes the fairy tale onto Dream House. Machado’s short story “The Husband Stitch” is a gender-aware inversion of “Bluebeard”. The reappearance of the tale throughout Machado’s work reveals the persistence of abusive behavioral patterns in relationships to the present day. Machado’s intertextual storytelling blurs the lines between autobiographical events and the tale of Bluebeard’s latest wife, creating a shared narrative universe of experiences of women who have dealt with their own iteration of Bluebeard. Full article
(This article belongs to the Special Issue Severed Limbs and Monstrous Appetites: (Re)Defining Fairy-Tale Horror from the Seventeenth Century to the Present)
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