ABSTRACT
This chapter explores how traditional tales such as myths, legends, and folktales reflect and support a culture’s history and values, but it also examines how those stories can be reinvented to question the assumptions that lie behind the original versions. Creation myths, deity myths, hero myths, and epics are explained with an emphasis on the Greek, Roman, and Norse myths that have influenced mainstream Western culture. Then works for young adults that retell and reinvent those myths and those of other cultures are presented. After describing retellings and reinventions of legends and tall tales, the chapter examines the ways in which traditional fairy tales have been reinvented, particularly for the purpose of challenging traditional gender stereotypes. The literature and the classroom activities described in this chapter allow readers who are approaching adulthood to revisit familiar tales and reconsider what those stories reveal about the culture in which they have grown up.
