ABSTRACT
Although rarely addressing them directly, fairy-tale scholars have long engaged in topics related to media convergence, now arising in debates between proponents of the “convergence culture” thesis and critical media scholars concerned about communicative capitalism. The former position views millennial information and communication technology (ICT) platforms as optimally expressive, even democratic; the latter emphasizes the danger of global capitalism dominating ICT policy and practice to suit its accumulative agenda. Foregrounding both cultural hybridity and a decolonizing multidirectionality, modern fairy-tale studies challenges this discursive binary by tracing structural patterns of fairy tales intermediating along a plenitude of forms, media, and political agendas. Advances in scholarship such as the global fairy-tale web, community-inclusive research on transmedia storytelling, and feminist, class-conscious, televisionary remediations of the Disney paratext for and by urban women workers/professionals lead folklorists, gender/sexuality scholars, and film/TV researchers toward fresh texts (telenovela creolizations), subjects (digital intermediations of Indigenous folklore as survivance), and methodologies (connecting community and commodified fairy-tale intertexts), to conceptualize a new-millennial, hypermediated, “fairy-tale studies 3.0.”
