What, when & where
Norm and Transgression in the Fairy-Tale Tradition: (Non)Normative Identities, Forms, and Writings
Brown University, 7-9 June 2023
Conference Organisers: Alessandro Cabiati (Ca’ Foscari University of Venice and Brown University) and Lewis Seifert (Brown University)
What can then be considered as normative, and what as transgressive, in a fairy tale? We invite proposals for papers that broadly address the above question(s), and which more narrowly consider, but are not limited to, the following themes:
- The laws of fairy land and the fairy world; breaking the law and committing crimes; investigations and trials; sentencing, punishments, and ‘fairy’ prisons; eye for an eye and the ‘poetic justice’ of fairy tales.
- The subversion of the categories of good and evil, and related notions of reward and punishment; the rejection of happy endings and ‘happily ever after’, and of moral messages and educational aims.
- Social and cultural taboos in fairy tales; prohibitions and interdictions; forbidden practices and illicit desires.
- Transgressions of the ‘once upon a time’ formula and of fairy-tale settings; fairy tales set in modern and contemporary times; the presence of science and technology in the fairy world and the intermingling of fairy tale, fantasy, and science fiction.
- Transgressions and violations of the human body; illness and physical deformity; amalgamation and equivalence of the human and the animal; posthuman figures.
- Gender rules and laws; princesses and laws of succession; adventurous heroines and rescued princes; ruling queens.
- Nonnormative identities; cross-dressing; gender fluidity; marvellous sexual metamorphoses and magical transsexuality; homo- and bisexual desire.
- Racial rules and laws; interracial relationships and marriages.
- Rewritings of traditional tales; poems, novels, and novellas with a fairy-tale plot; postmodern retellings.
- Non-Western fairy-tale traditions; translation of non-Western fairy tales in Western culture and vice versa.
- Adaptation as transgression; adaptation that becomes the norm (the Disney films); adaptation in other media, theatre, cinema, TV, comics; computer games and new technologies.
Deadline & how to apply
Please send an abstract of around 300 words for a 20-minute paper, along with a biographical note and your affiliation, to normandtransgression@brown.edu by 31 January 2023. Outcomes will be communicated by 28 February 2023. For regular updates about the conference, please visit the conference website.
Other info, Links & conditions
We plan to produce a Special Issue or an Edited Volume including a selection of papers presented at the conference.
The conference is planned as an in-person event, but contingency plans are in place to hold the conference online should it become necessary due to the changing nature of the pandemic.
This project has received funding from the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under the Marie Skłodowska-Curie grant agreement No 101025123.
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Photo by Natalia Yakovleva on Unsplash