Abstract: This article claims Margaret Atwood’s short story “Bluebeard’s Egg” demonstrates a form of literary upcycling by repurposing the original “Bluebeard” fairy tale to address contemporary concerns surrounding trauma, gender, and narrative sustainability. This process mirrors practices of environmental sustainability, where discarded materials are repurposed rather than disposed of, and therefore, this article suggests that Atwood reuses the fairy tale’s foundational structures while exposing what the original represses: the psychological aftermath of violence beyond the happy ending. Through the upcycling of the fairy tale, Atwood not only expresses her occupation of the narrative’s content but also suggests its potential sustainability. In doing so, she presents the idea that fairy tales endure through upcycling, yet this time not through static preservation, but through ongoing transformation that allows past traumas to resurface in contemporary cultural dialogue.
Abstract: L. Frank Baum’s Ozma of Oz (1907) presents a paradox of enchantment that oscillates between the magical and the modern, the human and the nonhuman. Using Arran Stibbe’s ecolinguistic tool kit, this article investigates how enchanted nonhuman figures are reinterpreted and retold in three twenty-first-century Chinese translations of Ozma of Oz . Viewed through the ecolinguistic lenses of erasure, salience, framing, and metaphor, these translations reconfigure the enchanted nonhuman figures and perceptions of what counts as agency. From this analysis emerges a postanthropocentric ethics of translation, through which (re)translations of fairy tales can become sites of imagining ethical world rebuilding, both with and against fairy-tale convention.
