Dr. Dorothea Trotter Publishes Facing Your Fears: Navigating Social Anxieties and Difference in Contemporary Fairy Tales
Congratulations to Dr. Dorothea Trotter on publication of an article鈥斺�攊苍 Literature 3, no. 3: 342-356.
The special issue in which Trotter's article appears is Severed Limbs and Monstrous Appetites: (Re)Defining Fairy-Tale Horror from the Seventeenth Century to the Present.
The abstract of "Facing Your Fears: Navigating Social Anxieties and Difference in Contemporary Fairy Tales":
In the 20th and 21st centuries, the rise of audio-visual media, particularly cinema and television, brought about new visual techniques and storytelling conventions that have transformed the way fairy tales are adapted for the screen. Initially adapted for a younger audience, newer adaptations often return to the darker and more horrific elements of the source texts; this includes body horror and an emphasis on physiological differences. This article employs structural, cultural, and folkloric interpretive lenses for the analysis of three contemporary, audio-visual fairy tales to discuss the way contemporary fairy tales include disability and difference as social constructs that are shaped by cultural attitudes and anxieties. The stories鈥� plots are driven by the protagonists鈥� 鈥渙therness鈥�, and these texts feature transformations that provide clues to understanding current standards of beauty and normality. I argue that newer adaptations place an emphasis on finding resolutions to difference that challenge the traditional idea that if one has a face or body that strays from the standard of the norm, one must die, relegate oneself to the margins, or join others like oneself.听
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