Myths and Fairy Tales in Contemporary Women's Fiction From Atwood to Morrison [Hardcover]

Myths and Fairy Tales in Contemporary Women's Fiction explores contemporary feminist, postmodernist, and postcolonial women writers' use and revisions of fairy tales and myths. With close readings of works ranging from Margaret Atwood to Doris Lessing to Toni Morrison, Wilson examines meanings of myths and fairy tales as well as their varying techniques, images, intertexts, and genres. Although the writers represent several different nationalities and racial, ethnic, and cultural backgrounds, they employ a type of postcolonial literature that urges readers and societies beyond colonization. Wilson argues that the use of myths and fairy tales generally convey characters' transformation from alienation and symbolic amputation to greater consciousness, community, and wholeness, and it is in and through story that characters construct a hybrid way of establishing themselves in the larger world.Atwood's Monstrous, Dismembered, Cannibalized, and (Sometimes) Reborn Female Bodies: The Robber Bride and Other TextsFitcher's and Frankenstein's Gaze in Oryx and CrakeThe Writer as Crone Goddess in Atwood's The Penelopiad and Lessing's Memoirs of a SurvivorMythic Quests for the Word and Postcolonial Identity: Lessing's The Story of Colonel Dann, Mara's Daughter, Griot andThe Snow Dog and Morrison's BelovedReading Erdrich's The Beet Queen : Demeter, The Wizard of Oz, The Ramayana, and Native American MythSilenced Women in Ferre's The Youngest Doll : 'The Red Shoes,' Cinderella,' 'Fitcher's Bird'Enchantment, Transformation, and Rebirth in Iris Murdoch's The Green KnightBluebeard's Forbidden Room in Rhys's Wide Sargasso SeaFairy Tales and Myth in Hulme's The Bone People

Bringing together this dissimilar group of authors is a major achievement. The complexity of Wilson's theoretical perspective is matched by the complexity of the relationships she intuits among these writers. The clarity of some of the insights in the book is breathtaking. - Carol L. Beran, Professor of EnglCh