Wayne State University Press Mapping Fairy-Tale Space: Pastiche and Metafiction in Borderless Tales (Series in Fairy-Tale Studies)

Review Williams (Hawai'i Pacific Univ.) explores TV shows Once upon a Time and Secret Garden (a Korean drama), plus five other texts that have at their center a crisis about the relevance and sustainability of fairy tales, and she argues that they engage the fairy tale as a relevant genre and remake it to create a new kind of fairy tale for audiences in the 21st century (p. 3).--M.R. Pukkila "Choice Connect" (12/1/2021 12:00:00 AM)Mapping Fairy-Tale Space brilliantly synthesizes and expands crucial ideas of connection and relatability that enliven contemporary fairy tales. Christy Williams offers fairy-tale studies a compelling gift that rewards attentive engagement. Fans and scholars need this book.--Jill Terry Rudy "Brigham Young University" (11/24/2020 12:00:00 AM)Mapping Fairy-Tale Space is a fascinating study that reconceptualizes fairy tales as geographical locations that can be mapped out and that can also have borders artificially imposed upon them. It illustrates how the paths fairy-tale characters follow, the trails of breadcrumbs they take, function as life maps that guide them and which they also contest. Each chapter adeptly showcases fairy-tale texts in which storyworld boundaries are challenged, collapsed, and stretched to accommodate new meanings in new sociohistorical contexts. Christy Williams provides us with an exciting and dynamic theoretical framework to rethink the fairy tale in terms of narrative geographies.--Anne E. Duggan "professor of French at Wayne State University and co-editor of Marvels and Tales: Journal of Fairy-Tale Studies (Wayne State University Press)" (11/24/2020 12:00:00 AM)Mapping Fairy-Tale Space is an exciting book. Williams guides us skillfully through contemporary fairy-tale landscapes, exploring their storyworlds' geography and tracing the continued appeal of the genre 'as a map for lived experience.' As she traces metafictional critiques and narrative strategies that popular fairy tales in print and on TV share, Williams invites us to revisit the practices of seriality and pastiche in relation to fairy tale and to recognize how opening up narrative borders revitalizes the genre. Richly layered, persuasive, and insightful, this is a study I will keep returning to.--Cristina Bacchilega "co-editor of Inviting Interruptions: Wonder Tales in the Twenty-First Century (Wayne State University Press, 2021)" (11/24/2020 12:00:00 AM)Christy Williams's book demonstrates her expert, expansive knowledge of fairy tales and their criticism as well as their role in popular and literary culture. This writing is lively and accessible yet sophisticated in its theoretical understanding of narrative and its interactions with geography. Williams is the first critic to bring such an erudite lens to some of the most popular recent incarnations of the classic fairy tales, such as Disney's Once Upon a Time, and her analysis is invigorating. Her understanding of how narrative creates geography and how connections across borders create narrative is welcome food for thought in these times.--Veronica Schanoes "author of Fairy Tales, Myth, and Psychoanalytic Theory: Feminism and Retelling the Tale" (11/24/2020 12:00:00 AM) Product Description Mapping Fairy-Tale Space: Pastiche and Metafiction in Borderless Tales by Christy Williams uses the metaphor of mapping to examine the narrative strategies employed in popular twenty-first-century fairy tales. It analyzes the television shows Once Upon a Time and Secret Garden (a Korean drama), the young-adult novel series The Lunar Chronicles, the Indexing serial novels, and three experimental short works of fiction by Kelly Link. Some of these texts reconfigure well-known fairy tales by combining individual tales into a single storyworld; others self-referentially turn to fairy tales for guidance. These contemporary tales have at their center a crisis about the relevance and sustainability of fairy tales, and Williams argues that they both engage the fairy