Awakenings and transformations: Re-visioning the tales of 'Sleeping Beauty,' 'Snow White,' 'The Frog Prince,' and 'Tam Lin'

From their earliest beginnings as part of the wealth in the storehouses of village storytellers, fairy tales have been tools used for the socialization and education of their audience, both the traditional audience of the oral tale and the more recent reading audience dominated by a specific culture or age group. These functions of the fairy tale still hold true today, though the tales are now usually told through media other than the time-honored oral form--in print, with and without accompanying illustrations, or in other visual media. While many retellers within the last two centuries have contented themselves with simply adapting the classic tales to these new media forms or to a specific age level or type of audience, others have reinterpreted and recast the old tales to suit contemporary political and social paradigms. Given that cultural context shapes both the elements and the message of a story, such "re-visioned" tales say much about the society that produced them.; This study explores the nature of contemporary revisionings for three of the most popular fairy tales for children today, "The Sleeping Beauty," "Snow White," and "The Frog Prince," plus a ballad that has recently proven to be popular with fantasy writers, the Scottish "Tam Lin." After laying the theoretical and critical groundwork and introducing some of the major literary figures who defined the canon familiar to today's Western culture, I examine each of the four narratives in detail, beginning with the classic version and then surveying various contemporary retellings. Chapter Seven pulls these strands together, offering an assessment of the nature of fairy-tale retelling in contemporary Western culture and how this literary form has had an impact on children's literature. That these tales are still so familiar and powerful despite being retold in a variety of forms indicates that literary variations, like variations in the oral tales, contribute to the longevity of a tale and prove its universal qualities.