Kay Turner

Pauline Greenhill

Contributors explore alternative readings and queer possibilities of the Grimm brothers' Kinder- und Hausmarchen (KHM, Children's and Household Tales).

Queering the Grimms

Transgressive Tales

Reality, Magic, and Other Lies: Fairy-Tale Film Truths explores connections and discontinuities between lies and truths in fairy-tale films to directly address the current politics of fairy tale and reality. Since the Enlightenment, notions of magic and wonder have been relegated to the realm of the fanciful, with science and reality understood as objective and true. But the skepticism associated with postmodern thought and critiques from diverse perspectives--including but not limited to anti-racist, decolonial, disability, and feminist theorizing--renders this binary distinction questionable. Further, the precise content of magic and science has shifted through history and across location. Pauline Greenhill offers the idea that fairy tales, particularly through the medium of film, often address those distinctions by making magic real and reality magical. Reality, Magic, and Other Lies consists of an introduction, two sections, and a conclusion, with the first section, "Studio, Director, and Writer Oeuvres," addressing how fairy-tale films engage with and challenge scientific or factual approaches to truth and reality, drawing on films from the stop-motion animation company LAIKA, the independent filmmaker Tarsem, and the storyteller and writer Fred Pellerin. The second section, "Themes and Issues from Three Fairy Tales," shows fairy-tale film magic exploring real-life issues and experiences using the stories of "Hansel and Gretel," "The Juniper Tree," and "Cinderella." The concluding section, "Moving Forward?" suggests that the key to facing the reality of contemporary issues is to invest in fairy tales as a guide, rather than a means of escape, by gathering your community and never forgetting to believe. Reality, Magic, and Other Lies--which will be of interest to film and fairy-tale scholars and students--considers the ways in which fairy tales in their mediated forms deconstruct the world and offer alternative views for peaceful, appropriate, just, and intersectionally multifaceted encounters with humans, non-human animals, and the rest of the environment.

Fairy-Tale Film Truths

Reality, Magic, and Other Lies

National Museum of Man (Canada)

Maritime Narratives from the Creighton Collection

Lots of Stories

Sonia Bookman

Steven Kohm

What do Canadian films say about crime and justice in Canada? What purpose to Canadian crime films serve politically and culturally? Screening Justice is a scholarly exploration of films that focus on crime and justice in Canada. Crime films are pivotal for understanding and shaping Canadian sensibilities by setting out widely available templates for thinking about crime and justice in Canadian society. Spanning disciplines and examining films from across Canada, Screening Justice is the first comprehensive Canadian volume on crime films that takes up cultural criminology’s call for more critical scholarly analyses of the interplay between crime, culture and society.

Canadian Crime Films, Culture and Society

Screening Justice

Diane Tye

In Unsettling Assumptions, editors Pauline Greenhill and Diane Tye link gender studies with traditional and popular culture studies to examine how tradition and gender can intersect to unsettle assumptions about culture and its study. Contributors explore the intersections of traditional expressive culture and sex/gender systems by challenging their conventional constructions, using sex/gender as a lens to question, investigate, or upset concepts like family, ethics, and authenticity. Individual essays consider myriad topics such as Thanksgiving turkeys, rockabilly and bar fights, Chinese tales of female ghosts, selkie stories, a noisy Mennonite New Year's celebration, the Distaff Gospels, Kentucky tobacco farmers, international adoptions, and more. In Unsettling Assumptions, expressive culture emerges as fundamental both to our sense of belonging to a family, an occupation, or friendship group and, most notably, to identity performativity. Within larger contexts, these works offer a better understanding of cultural attitudes like misogyny, homophobia, and racism as well as the construction and negotiation of power.

Tradition, Gender, Drag

Unsettling Assumptions

Sidney Eve Matrix

To set the field: fairy tales are traditional or literary fictional narratives that combine human and non-human protagonists with elements of wonder and the supernatural. Scholars of literature and film explore how such narratives manifest in film, either native to it or changelings from written literature or oral tradition. Among the topics are the commodification of childhood in contemporary fairy tale film, Guillermo del Toro's Pan's Labyrinth/El Laberinto del fauno and neomagical realism, feminism and place in The Juniper Tree, patriarchal backlash and nostalgia in Disney's Enchanted, feminist cultural pedagogy in Angela Carter and Neil Jordan's The Company of Wolves, and a secret midnight ball and a magic cloak in Stanley Kubrick's Eyes Wide Shut.

Visions of Ambiguity

Fairy Tale Films

Ontario is not a homogeneous culture, but rather a conglomerate of ethnic cultures and rural and urban populations. In True Poetry: Traditional and Popular Verse in Ontario, Pauline Greenhill describes and evaluates the significance of folk verse, suggesting that it provides a method for creating community solidarity and communicating cultural values and expectations.

Traditional and Popular Verse in Ontario

True Poetry

In Unsettling Assumptions, editors Pauline Greenhill and Diane Tye examine how tradition and gender come together to unsettle assumptions about culture and its study. Contributors explore the intersections of traditional expressive culture and sex/gender systems to question, investigate, or upset concepts like family, ethics, and authenticity. Individual essays consider myriad topics such as Thanksgiving turkeys, rockabilly and bar fights, Chinese tales of female ghosts, selkie stories, a noisy Mennonite New Year’s celebration, the Distaff Gospels, Kentucky tobacco farmers, international adoptions, and more. In Unsettling Assumptions, folkloric forms express but also counteract negative aspects of culture like misogyny, homophobia, and racism. But expressive culture also emerges as fundamental to our sense of belonging to a family, an occupation, or friendship group and, most notably, to identity performativity and the construction and negotiation of power.

Contributors demonstrate that informal traditional and popular expressive cultural forms continue to be central to Canadians' gender constructions and clearly display the creation and re-creation of women's often subordinate position in society. They not only explore positive and negative images of women - the witch, the Icelandic Mountain Woman, and the Hollywood "killer dyke" - but also examine how actual women - taxi drivers, quilters, spiritual healers, and storytellers - negotiate and remake these images in their lives and work. Contributors also propose models for facilitating feminist dialogue on traditional and popular culture in Canada. Drawing on perspectives from women's studies, folklore, anthropology, sociology, art history, literature, and religious studies, Undisciplined Women is an insightful exploration of the multiplicity of women's experiences and the importance of reclaiming women's cultures and traditions.

Tradition and Culture in Canada

Undisciplined Women

Showing Family Photographs

So We Can Remember

Television has long been a familiar vehicle for fairy tales and is, in some ways, an ideal medium for the genre. Both more mundane and more wondrous than cinema, TV magically captures sounds and images that float through the air to bring them into homes, schools, and workplaces. Even apparently realistic forms, like the nightly news, routinely employ discourses of “once upon a time,” “happily ever after,” and “a Cinderella story.” In Channeling Wonder: Fairy Tales on Television, Pauline Greenhill and Jill Terry Rudy offer contributions that invite readers to consider what happens when fairy tale, a narrative genre that revels in variation, joins the flow of television experience. Looking in detail at programs from Canada, France, Italy, Japan, the UK, and the U.S., this volume’s twenty-three international contributors demonstrate the wide range of fairy tales that make their way into televisual forms. The writers look at fairy-tale adaptations in musicals like Rodgers and Hammerstein’s Cinderella, anthologies like Jim Henson’s The Storyteller, made-for-TV movies like Snow White: A Tale of Terror, Bluebeard, and the Red Riding Trilogy, and drama serials like Grimm and Once Upon a Time. Contributors also explore more unexpected representations in the Carosello commercial series, the children’s show Super Why!, the anime series Revolutionary Girl Utena, and the live-action dramas Train Man and Rich Man Poor Woman. In addition, they consider how elements from familiar tales, including “Hansel and Gretel,” “Little Red Riding Hood,” “Beauty and the Beast,” “Snow White,” and “Cinderella” appear in the long arc serials Merlin, Buffy the Vampire Slayer, and Dollhouse, and in a range of television formats including variety shows, situation comedies, and reality TV. Channeling Wonder demonstrates that fairy tales remain ubiquitous on TV, allowing for variations but still resonating with the wonder tale’s familiarity. Scholars of cultural studies, fairy-tale studies, folklore, and television studies will enjoy this first-of-its-kind volume.

Fairy Tales on Television

Channeling Wonder

Jack Zipes

Kendra Magnus-Johnston

The fairy tale has become one of the dominant cultural forms and genres internationally, thanks in large part to its many manifestations on screen. Yet the history and relevance of the fairy-tale film have largely been neglected. In this follow-up to Jack Zipes’s award-winning book The Enchanted Screen (2011), Fairy-Tale Films Beyond Disney offers the first book-length multinational, multidisciplinary exploration of fairy-tale cinema. Bringing together twenty-three of the world’s top fairy-tale scholars to analyze the enormous scope of these films, Zipes and colleagues Pauline Greenhill and Kendra Magnus-Johnston present perspectives on film from every part of the globe, from Hayao Miyazaki’s Spirited Away, to Jan Švankmajer’s Alice, to the transnational adaptations of 1001 Nights and Hans Christian Andersen. Contributors explore filmic traditions in each area not only from their different cultural backgrounds, but from a range of academic fields, including criminal justice studies, education, film studies, folkloristics, gender studies, and literary studies. Fairy-Tale Films Beyond Disney offers readers an opportunity to explore the intersections, disparities, historical and national contexts of its subject, and to further appreciate what has become an undeniably global phenomenon.

International Perspectives

Fairy-Tale Films Beyond Disney

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.

Redressing a neglect of women's traditions and feminist perspectives in Canadian folklore studies, 20 contributions discuss female experiences of traditional culture from feminist viewpoints. The authors look at the effect of gender on the collecting and interpreting of women's folklore, negative and positive images of women in traditional and popular culture, and women's use of creativity in their everyday lives. Some contributors are nonacademics. Annotation copyrighted by Book News, Inc., Portland, OR

Naomi Hamer

Jill Terry Rudy

Lauren Bosc

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.

The Routledge Companion to Media and Fairy-Tale Cultures

This concise and accessible critical introduction examines the world of popular fairy-tale television, tracing how fairy tales and their social and cultural implications manifest within series, television events, anthologies, and episodes, and as freestanding motifs. Providing a model of televisual analysis, Rudy and Greenhill emphasize that fairy-tale longevity in general, and particularly on TV, results from malleability—morphing from extremely complex narratives to the simple quotation of a name (like Cinderella) or phrase (like "happily ever after")—as well as its perennial value as a form that is good to think with. The global reach and popularity of fairy tales is reflected in the book’s selection of diverse examples from genres such as political, lifestyle, reality, and science fiction TV. With a select mediagraphy, discussion questions, and detailed bibliography for further study, this book is an ideal guide for students and scholars of television studies, popular culture, and media studies, as well as dedicated fairy-tale fans.

Pauline Greenhill

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