Sandra L. Beckett

Children’s authors who recycle classic fairy tales by modernizing, transfiguring, and subverting nonetheless achieve their goals through the use of the archetypes, characters, motifs, and narrative structures and codes of an age-old genre. While revealing shifts in social values and ideologies, retold stories also transmit a cultural heritage. The genre of the fairy tale, perhaps more than any other, provides the security of a cultural past and a repository of cultural memory, while at the same time allowing contemporary authors to address contemporary socio-cultural and literary preoccupations. I have mentioned elsewhere that the fact that Little Red Riding Hood is part of the literary heritage of almost every child in the Western world allows children’s authors to pursue some of the complex narrative structures and techniques of postmodern mainstream literature in texts for very young children.

One of the most exciting innovations in contemporary retellings of Little Red Riding Hood (and I’ve read scores of them while writing a book titled Recycling Red Riding Hood for Jack Zipes’ collection with Garland) is the sophisticated metafictive play in self-reflexive works that constantly expose their status as fiction. Somewhat paradoxically, a tale inherited from the oral tradition becomes a vehicle for exploring the concept of ‘literariness’ and for metaliterary play. This type of literary play demands a deep and intuitive understanding of the hypotext, as well as of the ‘meccano’ of the fairy-tale genre. As John Stephens points out, this self-conscious textuality ‘implies a reader whose role is that of author’s playmate, sharing a game with deducible rules, and being a little more conscious of the way meanings are both linguistically and socially constructed.’ This paper proposes to examine various types of metaliterary play in an international selection of retellings of Little Red Riding Hood.

Back to: IRSCL Conference Programme