Feminist, Gender, and Sexuality Studies Commons^™

Telling Old Tales Newly : Intertextuality In Young Adult Fiction For Girls, Elisabeth Rose Gruner

English Faculty Publications

In one of the inaugural articles in feminist literary criticism, "Feminism and Fairy Tales," Karen Rowe followed Simon de Beauvoir's lead in claiming that fairy tales structure the consciousness of girls and women, and in a negative way. As Donald Haase has noted, "In Rowe's view, the fairy tale--perhaps precisely because of its 'awesome imaginative power'--had a role to play in cultivating equality among men and women, but it would have to be a rejuvenated fairy tale fully divested of its idealized romantic fantasies" (5). In the years since Rowe's essay first appeared, however, it has been unclear whether the …