Extract

Fairy tales are not merely bedtime stories but reflect on the socio-economic conditions, gender roles, class positioning and national allegiances of those who produce and consume them. Taking this argument as her general premise, Anne Martin demonstrates the dynamic interplay between modernism and fairy tales in the work of James Joyce, Virginia Woolf and Djuna Barnes. According to Martin, novels such as Ulysses, Mrs. Dalloway and Nightwood do not rewrite fairy tales but rather allude to them as intertextual co-presences, revealing the inherent ambiguities in the tales and the social lessons they are supposedly intended to teach. In their referencing of “Cinderella” and “Little Red Riding Hood”, these texts explore how fashion and clothes fundamentally influence the construction of desire in the subject. Martin highlights how the creative demands of reading as well as storytelling can be both an erotic experience and one that informs our understanding of the relations between pleasure and power. Overall, she convincingly argues that the subtle readings of fairy tales found in Joyce, Woolf and Barnes were acts of appropriation that allowed them to redefine, for themselves and us as readers, the fluidity of gendered identities and sexual relations.

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