Cinderella Across Cultures: New Directions and Interdisciplinary Perspectives

Examines the tale of Cinderella as a fascinating, multilayered, and ever-changing story constantly reinvented in different media and traditions.

The Cinderella story is retold continuously in literature, illustration, music, theatre, ballet, opera, film, and other media, and folklorists have recognized hundreds of distinct forms of Cinderella plots worldwide. The focus of this volume, however, is neither Cinderella as an item of folklore nor its alleged universal meaning. In Cinderella across Cultures, editors Martine Hennard Dutheil de la Rochère, Gillian Lathey, and Monika Wozniak analyze the Cinderella tale as a fascinating, multilayered, and ever-changing story constantly reinvented in different media and traditions.

The collection highlights the tale’s reception and adaptation in cultural and national contexts across the globe, including those of Italy, France, Germany, Britain, the Netherlands, Poland, and Russia. Contributors shed new light on classic versions of Cinderella by examining the material contexts that shaped them (such as the development of glass artifacts and print techniques), or by analyzing their reception in popular culture (through cheap print and mass media). The first section, ＂Contextualizing Cinderella,＂ investigates the historical and cultural contexts of literary versions of the tale and their diachronic transformations. The second section, ＂Regendering Cinderella,＂ tackles innovative and daring literary rewritings of the tale in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, in particular modern feminist and queer takes on the classic plot. Finally, the third section, ＂Visualising Cinderella,＂ concerns symbolic transformations of the tale, especially the interaction between text and image and the renewal of the tale’s iconographic tradition.

The volume offers an invaluable contribution to the study of this particular tale and also to fairy-tale studies overall. Readers interested in the visual arts, in translation studies, or in popular culture, as well as a wider audience wishing to discover the tale anew will delight in this collection.

Martine Hennard Dutheil de la Roch?re is professor of English and comparative literature at the University of Lausanne, Switzerland. She is the author of Reading, Translating, Rewriting: Angela Carter’s Translational Poetics (Wayne State University Press, 2013).

Gillian Lathey is Senior Honorary Research Fellow at the University of Roehampton, London, where from 2004 to 2012 she was director of the National Centre for Research in Children’s Literature. She is the author of The Role of Translators in Children’s Literature: Invisible Storytellers and Translating Children’s Literature and is co-editor with Vanessa Joosen of Grimms’ Tales Around The Globe: The Dynamics of Their International Reception (Wayne State University Press, 2014).

Monika Wozniak is associate professor of Polish language and literature at Sapienza University of Rome. She has published extensively in Polish, Italian, and English. She is the co-author of the Polish-language monograph Przeklady w systemie malych literatur (Translations in the System of Minor Literatures, 2014).