A note on post modern fairy tales

"Archetypes of the genre--- the innocent heroine, the charming prince, the terrorizing witch--- offer clearly drawn gender roles.  But Christina Bacchilega considers the ideological dimension of this clarity fundamental to the genre's facade and a trap for the complacent reader, 'What distinguishes the tale of magic or fairy tales as a genre [...] is its effort to conceal its work systematically---to naturalize its artifice, to make everything so clear that it works magic, no questions asked.'  By relentlessly questioning, deconstructing and posing alternatives to this 'naturalized artifice', post-modern fairy tales rigorously hold these transparent stories up to the light."

---Soman Chainani, The Politics of Content Revision in Angela Carter's "Snow Child"
Marvel & Tales  17.2 (2003) 212-235
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