What, when & where
Special Issue of Literature “Severed Limbs and Monstrous Appetites: (Re)Defining Fairy-Tale Horror from the Seventeenth Century to the Present”
Special Issue Editors: Prof. Dr. Laura Tosi and Dr. Alessandro Cabiati
In a Christmas 2017 interview for the British magazine Fortean Times, celebrated Mexican filmmaker Guillermo Del Toro described ‘Hansel and Gretel’, ‘the original Cinderella’, and ‘Little Red Riding Hood’ as ‘a horror story’, before affirming that, in his opinion, ‘horror and the fairy tale walk hand in hand’. This statement is hardly surprising coming from a director whose oeuvre includes such films as Pan’s Labyrinth (2006) and The Shape of Water (2017), which strive to merge fairy-tale and horror themes, motifs, and imagery. Contemporary cinema and literature have frequently combined fairy-tale and horror elements, introducing twentieth-century horror visuals into fairy-tale narratives and reinterpreting characters and settings of the fairy-tale tradition through a horror lens. Examples include Gothic retellings of the ‘Snow White’ story, such as Michael Cohn’s Snow White: A Tale of Terror (1997), or the various horror adaptations of ‘Hansel and Gretel’, including Pil-Sung Yim’s film Hansel and Gretel (2007). Similarly popular has been the transformation of Little Red Riding Hood’s wolf into a werewolf, featuring in Angela Carter’s short stories ‘The Werewolf’ and ‘The Company of Wolves’—part of her collection The Bloody Chamber and Other Stories (1979), which reworks classic fairy tales from a Gothic horror perspective—but also in Catherine Hardwicke’s 2011 film Red Riding Hood.
If horror and the fairy tale are so easily intermingled, can horror then be considered as a distinctive feature of the literary fairy tale? In ‘Bluebeard’ (1697), after all, Perrault creates an atmosphere of mystery and expectation of violence before describing Bluebeard’s closet, which contains the numerous corpses of his murdered wives, whose clotted blood covers the floor. Blood, bodily mutilation, and body parts are in fact extensively represented in fairy tales. Before Disney’s sanitized film adaptations, tales such as the Grimm’s versions of ‘Cinderella’ and ‘Snow White’ (1812) depicted horrific images, such as severed limbs, cannibalism, and other types of bodily violence. As far as cannibalism is concerned, the Grimm’s ‘Hansel and Gretel’ and Perrault’s ‘Le Petit Poucet’ are among the most famous stories, but cannibalistic acts or desires are also central in lesser-known tales, such as Perrault’s version of ‘Sleeping Beauty’ or the Grimm’s ‘The Juniper Tree’.
What are the roles, functions, and meanings of horror in a fairy-tale narrative? This Special Issue of Literature aims to answer this question, inviting proposals for essays that consider, but are not limited to, the following topics:
- The evolution of fairy-tale horror in its various forms and iterations, from the seventeenth century to the present;
- The contemporary questioning of the boundaries between the genres of fairy tale and horror and its theoretical implications;
- The moralistic and/or educational purposes of horror scenes in fairy tales (the horrors of a transgressive act and its violent punishment);
- The subversion of traditional morals and happy endings in horror retellings of fairy tales;
- Nineteenth-, twentieth-, and twenty-first-century Gothic and horror adaptations of literary fairy tales, in literature as well as in other media (cinema, theatre, TV, comics, and video games);
- Literary experimentation and the interaction of fairy-tale and horror elements in Romanticism, Decadence, modernism, and postmodernism;
- Fairy-tale monsters (such as ogres, witches, and cannibals) in the horror tradition;
- Freud’s concept of the ‘uncanny’ and its possible applications in the study of fairy-tale horror;
- The transformation of anthropomorphic animals of fairy tales into (post)human characters (for instance, wolves into werewolves);
- The interplay between psychological terrors and visual horrors in the fairy-tale tradition.
Deadline & how to apply
Please send a proposal of around 500 words, along with a biographical note, to both guest editors by 30 November 2022. Full papers are due on 30 April 2023.
Other info, Links & conditions
More info: https://www.mdpi.com/journal/literature/special_issues/HZAUF96Z1U
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