ABSTRACT
Fairy tales have been subject to reinterpretation in both literary scholarship and creative productions. Both fiction (in various media) and criticism engage in understanding and evaluating their meaning for contemporary society, and this mutual interest on the part of both scholars and creative artists produces compelling convergences. This chapter discusses the interaction between fairy-tale retellings and criticism and the way they inspire, reflect on, and complement each other. After introducing the traditional features of expressive and critical discourse, I discuss a selection of hybrid media forms that mix features of the two. I then analyze the interaction between fairy-tale criticism and the creative response to fairy tales, focusing on one aspect of contemporary fairy-tale culture: the literary fairy-tale rewriting. The processes that I describe are, however, not unique to literature: fairy-tale adaptations in other media interact in similar ways with fairy-tale criticism, and various literary rewritings have been used as the basis for films and television programs.
