Justice in 21st-Century Fairy Tales and the Power of Wonder
By: Cristina Bacchilega and Pauline Greenhill
Edition: 1st ed.
Series: Perspectives on Fantasy
Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic
Published: 2025
Place of publication: London
Language: eng
Number of pages: 232
ISBN-13: 9781350348295; 9781350348264; 9781350348271; 9781350348288; 9781350348301
Subjects: Fairy tales; History and criticism; Fantastic, The, in literature; Justice in literature; Wonder in literature; Fantasy; Film theory & criticism; Literary studies: fiction, novelists & prose writers
Description: Exploring a range of international works such as films, streaming television series, a graphic novel, and a picture book, this open access book interrogates how, and to what extent, fairy tales are put to work for justice in the areas of environment and ecology, kinship and family, ability and disability, and sex and gender. As Bacchilega and Greenhill demonstrate, some 21st-century fairy tales channel the genre's wonder to offer otherwise possibilities for being and acting in the world that are not confined to socially sanctioned paths. Drawing on visual and audio-visual case studies of texts such as The Magic Fish, Julián Is A Mermaid, Pokot [Spoor], Gräns [Border], The Dragon Prince, Gatta Cenerentola [Cinderella the Cat], and Sweet Tooth, they examine how the wonder and preternatural of fairy tales model a sustained desire to believe in and realize new ways of existence that have often been too easily dismissed.  Guided by theories in fields including ecological, gender, disability, critical race, Indigenous, fantasy, posthuman, and adaptation studies as they intersect with folklore and fairy tale studies, this book examines how creators of wonder tales since the beginning of the new millenium have presented provocations around humans' political and social relations with nature and culture. Analyzing justice from a variety of positions and establishing how tales of the otherwise can develop optative thinking, Justice in 21st-Century Fairy Tales and the Power of Wonder refutes the conservative, patriarchal, and merely nostalgic Disnified narrative of the genre and insists on the power of wonder within and beyond fairy tales. The eBook editions of this book are available open access under a CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 licence on bloomsburycollections.com. Open access was funded by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada grant 435-2019-0691 and The University of Winnipeg, Canada.
Notes: Open Access Unrestricted online access

Compliant with Level AA of the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines. Content is displayed as HTML full text which can easily be resized or read with assistive technology, with mark-up that allows screen readers and keyboard-only users to navigate easily
Table of contents: title: Acknowledgements Credits 1. Tales of the Otherwise 2. Storyworld Thinking and Fairy-Tale Relationality: Greed and Its Discontents 3. Justice for Monsters: Toward a Popular Green Criminology of "Little Red Riding Hood" 4. Finding Oneself Between Species: Hybrid Creatures and Kinship 5. Spirited Borders: Wonder Genres and Decolonial Hauntologies 6. Fairy-Tale Mixing: Reanimation Wanted for Better Futures 7. Epilogue: The Fairy Tale's "What If?" and Wonder Media for Justice Bibliography  Mediagraphy Index