Myths and Fairy Tales in Contemporary Women's Fiction, 2008 From Atwood to Morrison

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 Texts Fitcher's and Frankenstein's Gaze in Oryx and Crake The Writer as Crone Goddess in Atwood's The Penelopiad and Lessing's Memoirs of a Survivor Mythic Quests for the Word and Postcolonial Identity: Lessing's The Story of Colonel Dann, Mara's Daughter, Griot and The Snow Dog and Morrison's Beloved Reading Erdrich's The Beet Queen : Demeter, The Wizard of Oz, The Ramayana, and Native American Myth Silenced Women in Ferre's The Youngest Doll : 'The Red Shoes,' Cinderella,' 'Fitcher's Bird' Enchantment, Transformation, and Rebirth in Iris Murdoch's The Green Knight Bluebeard's Forbidden Room in Rhys's Wide Sargasso Sea Fairy Tales and Myth in Hulme's The Bone People

SHARON R. WILSON is Professor of English and Women's Studies, University of Northern Colorado, USA.