Fairy Tale Futures: Critical Reflections

This article provides critical reflections on Stijn Praet and Anna Kérchy’s edited collection, The Fairy Tale Vanguard: Literary Self-Consciousness in a Marvelous Genre (2019). Vanguard can be defined as “the foremost part of an advancing army or naval force,” with established and emerging critics marching in defence of the fairy tale against the genre’s complicated reception throughout the ages. The form’s self-consciousness and intertextual complexity is foregrounded, with fairy tale experiments ranging from those of 17th-century French female conteuses, to modernist short stories and contemporary films, which all combine into a celebration of the genre’s sophistication and continued relevance. The book engages with the generic complexity of the fairy tale, defying any kind of neat categorisation. ‘Fairy tale’ often functions as a ‘catch-all’ term for different fairy tale narratives, but this study paves the way for reflections on new subgenres such as the ‘anti-tale’. Finally, it is suggested that Rikki Ducornet’s idea of the ‘deep magic’ of fairy tales opens us up to a possibility, to an embrace of the unknown and all of its potentiality, providing us with an imaginative space within which to envision a new and better reality. This is foregrounded as a central tenant to The Fairy Tale Vanguard’s privileging of experimentation, which highlights that the fairy tale harnesses a deeply political potential in challenging current oppressions. Perhaps it is not us, fairy tale scholars, who are marching to the aid of the fairy tale then, rather it is the tales fighting for us in an unjust world.