In this article, it is shown how authors of fairy-tale retellings have incorporated ideas of feminist literary criticism into a fictional form. As such, these retellings display the tension between the pedagogic and aesthetic aspects of all children’s literature. Jane Yolen’s Sleeping Ugly is chosen as a case study: although it can be argued that the book serves as a mouthpiece for the ideology of the emancipation movement formulated in Marcia Lieberman’s key text “Some Day My Prince Will Come,” it is suggested that Sleeping Ugly teaches children to read against a text’s authority and as such undermines its own didactic potential.
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Vanessa Joosen (1977) has a Masters degree in English and German Literature from the University of Antwerp, and an MA in Children’s Literature from the University of Surrey Roehampton. In 2003, she received an FWO scholarship to fund her PhD at the University of Antwerp. She researches the interaction between fairy-tale retellings and criticism on fairy tales in the period from 1970 to 2000. Recent publications include “Translating Dutch into Dutch” in Signal 100, and an article on Belgian children’s books in Peter Hunt’s International Companion to Children’s Literature.
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Joosen, V. Fairy-tale Retellings between Art and Pedagogy. Child Lit Educ 36, 129–139 (2005). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10583-005-3501-x
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10583-005-3501-x