ABSTRACT
Narrative genres, like the fairy tale and the novel, are often caught up in geopolitical fantasies ranging from the national and imperial to the postcolonial and diasporic. This chapter explores temporality in the European fairy tale and the global novel as a critical register that not only facilitates the mutual adaptation of the two genres but also opens possibilities for their radical reinterpretation. It offers a reading of Karen King-Aribisala's The Hangman's Game, acutely punctuated by "Snow White," as an example of how the doubled motions and intercalated transformations of the European fairy tale and the global novel might enrich our sense of multiple histories in process. As hybrid narratives, the European-fairy-tale-as-global-novel and the global-novel-as-European-fairy-tale disturb each other's traditional genre boundaries and ultimately expose the geopolitical dimensions of their production. The European fairy-tale's formulaic structure provides certain cohesion to the genre that suggests the universality of individual tale types.
