Fairy Tales Transformed? Twenty-First-Century Adaptations and Politics of Wonder. By Cristina Bacchilega. Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 2013. 290 pp.Cristina Bacchilega's Fairy Tales Transformed? Twenty-First-Century Adaptations and Politics of Wonder is a theoretically sophisticated analysis of contemporary cultural and artistic uses of fairy tales. It emphasizes local epistemologies as key to reinvigorating poetics and politics of wonder, a phrase Bacchilega uses to refer to power dynamics at stake in telling, reading, and watching of fairy tales (ix). The purpose of this project, Bacchilega writes, is to direct our attention to significance of orality and located epistemologies in multimedia traditions and to relationship of folk and fairy tales with other cultures' wonder (196). In doing so, she directs her readers as well to a variety of unusual adaptations and provides convincing, complex analyses that coalesce into a wide-ranging and compelling examination of what she terms contemporary fairy-tale (27).Bacchilega introduces and develops term web in book's Introduction, in which she describes significant changes that have taken place in field of adaptations, revisions, and media since renaissance of 1970s. She notes that visionary writers such as Angela Carter have since become revered elders and sources themselves for contemporary adapters, and she directs our attention to explosion of trans-media work to be found on Internet (74). Bacchilega figures current landscape as a web that allows scholars to understand the construction of a history and remapping of that are not insulated from power structures and struggles of capitalism, colonialism, coloniality, and disciplinarity; and to envision current cultural practices in an intertextual dialogue with one another that is informed not only by interests of entertainment or culture industry and dynamics of globalization . . . but also by more multivocal and unpredictable uses of genre (18). In this introductory chapter Bacchilega lays out several core questions for book, asking what stakes are in contemporary adaptations both within a European cultural framework and when relocated to non-Western wonder genres and traditions as well as uses to which The Arabian Nights has been put in a cultural context where European fairy tales dominate.Chapter 1, Activist Responses: Adaptation, Remediation, and Relocation, surveys literature theorizing intertextuality and adaptation and moves beyond texts to include social activism in web. Bacchilega analyzes Skin Folk (2002) by Nalo Hopkinson and Kissing Witch (1993) by Emma Donoghue, arguing that these two writers use relocation as a relational rather than an oppositional framework for transformation of fairy tales and that their use of specific located knowledges is a way of decolonizing our understanding of intertexts. …
