Fairy tales transformed? : twenty-first-century adaptations and the politics of wonder /

Bacchilega (English, Univ. of Hawai'i, Manoa) offers a dazzling array of fairy tale adaptations, ranging from well-known movies like Enchanted to less-known non-American films, books, art projects, and graphic novels. She pulls together different approaches in a rich and thoughtful attempt to understand all the ways in which fairy tales continue to speak to a huge and often-contradictory audience, alternatively affirming traditional ideologies and offering subversive retellings. The depth of Bachhilega's understanding is truly amazing, and her discussion of individual texts is always illuminating. That said, her overarching conceit is not as dazzling. Bacchilega claims that the sheer variety of media and approaches constitutes a (worldwide) web that, as she puts it in her introduction, "interpellate[s] us as consumers and producers of transformation." Throughout the book there are illustrations of how texts and sometimes individual words fit together, and there are repeated references to webs, convergence, and hypertextuality. These add little to the truly outstanding arguments Bacchilega makes about intertextuality, globalization, and the political elements of fairy tales. Overall, however, this is an engaging and powerful work on an important set of texts. Summing Up: Highly recommended. Upper-division undergraduates and above. A. Castaldo Widener University