Publisher:
Lang, Peter, AG, Internationaler Verlag der Wissenschaften, Bern
This book provides an analysis of the representation of women's bodies and their monstrous metamorphoses in selected short stories by contemporary English writer Michele Roberts. The author explores the relationship between traditional fairy tales...
more
This book provides an analysis of the representation of women's bodies and their monstrous metamorphoses in selected short stories by contemporary English writer Michele Roberts. The author explores the relationship between traditional fairy tales such as the Grimm Brothers' and Charles Perrault's, the lives of female saints and Roberts's counter-narratives, focussing on the analysis of images of sublimed fleshliness and of acts of monstrous violence on the body. The book takes into account relevant Women's Studies criticism regarding the mother-daughter relationship, as Roberts's stories ques
Table of Contents; Introduction 11; CHAPTER 1 Fairy Tales and Contemporary Women's Short Stories 17; Rewriting fairy tales and hagiography 32; Reworking motherhood 38; The mother-daughter relationship 52; Empowering monstrosity in contemporary fairy tales 57; CHAPTER 2 Monstrous Inheritance: Animal Bodies 63; Anger and the tradition of contes melusiniens 64; Angry young women 68; CHAPTER 3 Cutting the Body Free: Between Hagiography and Fairy Tales 79; "Flesh of my flesh": the body in pain? 83; CHAPTER 4 Knowledge and Desire: Cannibal Appetites 97; Cannibalism and fairy tale tradition 98
Cooking the cannibal 103Conclusions 109; References 113;
