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Introduction: Fairy Tales on the Contemporary Teen Screen

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Fairy Tales on the Teen Screen

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Abstract

This book explores teen screen texts in which girls challenge limiting and prescriptive rituals of feminine adolescence. There is a marked contemporary trend in retelling and revising the fairy tale on the teen screen, and this book explores how this trend is reflected in texts such as Red Riding Hood (Hardwicke 2011), Twilight (Hardwicke 2008), Pretty Little Liars (ABC Family 2010–), Gossip Girl (The CW 2007–2012) and Aquamarine (Allen 2006). These texts are notable for the shifts they enact in the representation of gender in the fairy tale, unsettling the sexist narrative economy upon which many of the tales by Charles Perrault (1697), the Brothers Grimm (1857) and Hans Christian Andersen (1837) relied. I explore liminal moments in these teen screen rites of passage when feminine adolescent resistance occurs, because these moments represent a rupture in dominant narratives of girlhood and are therefore central to a feminist reading of the teen screen.

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  1. University of Melbourne, Melbourne, VIC, Australia

    Athena Bellas

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Bellas, A. (2017). Introduction: Fairy Tales on the Contemporary Teen Screen. In: Fairy Tales on the Teen Screen. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-64973-3_1

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