Uncanny Fairy Tales

"There are fairy tales that surprise, destabilise, or even shock us: these are uncanny fairy tales that manipulate familiar stories in creative and bewildering ways in order to express new meanings. This work analyses these tales basing its approach on a reformulation of Freud's concept of the uncanny. Through a cognitive outlook the employed theoretical framework provides new perspectives on the study of experimental literary fairy tales. Considering English-language literature, complex and unsettling re-interpretations of the fairy-tale discourse began to appear during the Victorian Age, later resurfacing as a postmodern trend. This research individuates uncanny-related narrative techniques and cognitive responses as means to decodify and explore these tales, and as ways to discover unseen connections between Victorian and postmodern texts. The new theorisation of the uncanny is linked with three sub-concepts: mirror, hybridity, and wonder, which function as tools to describe and investigate the cognitive and emotional entanglements characterising enigmatic and disorienting fairy tales"--

This book explores the idiosyncratic effects generated as fairytale and gothic horror join, clash or merge in cinema. Identifying long-held traditions that have inspired this topical phenomenon, the book features close analysis of classical through to contemporary films. It begins by tracing fairytale and gothic origins and evolutions, examining the diverse ways these have been embraced and developed by cinema horror. It moves on to investigate films close up, locating fairytale horror, motifs and themes and a distinctively cinematic gothic horror. At the book’s core are recurring concerns including: the boundaries of the human; rational and irrational forces; fears and dreams; ‘the uncanny’ and transitions between the wilds and civilization. While chronology shapes the book, it is thematically driven, with an interest in the cultural and political functions of fairytale and gothic horror, and the levels of transgression or social conformity at the heart of the films.

There are fairy tales that surprise, destabilise, or even shock us: these are uncanny fairy tales that manipulate familiar stories in creative and bewildering ways in order to express new meanings. This work analyses these tales, basing its approach on a reformulation of Freud’s concept of the uncanny. Through a cognitive outlook the employed theoretical framework provides new perspectives on the study of experimental literary fairy tales. Considering English-language literature, complex and unsettling reinterpretations of the fairy-tale discourse began to appear during the Victorian Age, later resurfacing as a postmodern trend. This research individuates uncanny-related narrative techniques and cognitive responses as means to decodify and explore these tales, and as ways to discover unseen connections between Victorian and postmodern texts. The new theorisation of the uncanny is linked with three subconcepts: mirror, hybridity, and wonder, which function as tools to describe and investigate the cognitive and emotional entanglements characterising enigmatic and disorienting fairy tales.

Writing the Uncanny sees some of the best contemporary authors explain what drew them to horror, ghost stories, folklore and beyond, and reveal how to craft unsettling fiction which resonates. An essential guide for both the casual reader and the aspiring writer of strange tales.

This collection brings together 15 specially commissioned stories by internationally acclaimed writers and filmmakers, to explore and update Freud's classic theory of 'The Uncanny' - his piercing and all-encompassing dissection of what gives us the creeps.

The fairy tale is arguably one of the most important cultural and social influences on children's lives. But until the first publication of Fairy Tales and the Art of Subversion, little attention had been paid to the ways in which the writers and collectors of tales used traditional forms and genres in order to shape children's lives – their behavior, values, and relationship to society. As Jack Zipes convincingly shows in this classic work, fairy tales have always been a powerful discourse, capable of being used to shape or destabilize attitudes and behavior within culture. How and why did certain authors try to influence children or social images of children? How were fairy tales shaped by the changes in European society in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries? Zipes examines famous writers of fairy tales such as Charles Perrault, Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm, Hans Christian Andersen and L.Frank Baum and considers the extraordinary impact of Walt Disney on the genre as a fairy tale filmmaker.

From the deeply unsettling to the possibly supernatural, these thirty-one border-crossing stories from around the world explore the uncanny in literature, and delve into our increasingly unstable sense of self, home, and planet. The Uncanny Reader: Stories from the Shadows opens with "The Sand-man," E.T.A. Hoffmann's 1817 tale of doppelgangers and automatons—a tale that inspired generations of writers and thinkers to come. Stories by 19th and 20th century masters of the uncanny—including Edgar Allan Poe, Franz Kafka, and Shirley Jackson—form a foundation for sixteen award-winning contemporary authors, established and new, whose work blurs the boundaries between the familiar and the unknown. These writers come from Egypt, France, Germany, Japan, Poland, Russia, Scotland, England, Sweden, the United States, Uruguay, and Zambia—although their birthplaces are not always the terrains they plumb in their stories, nor do they confine themselves to their own eras. Contemporary authors include: Chris Adrian, Aimee Bender, Kate Bernheimer, Jean-Christophe Duchon-Doris, Mansoura Ez-Eldin, Jonathon Carroll, John Herdman, Kelly Link, Steven Millhauser, Joyce Carol Oates, Yoko Ogawa, Dean Paschal, Karen Russell, Namwali Serpell, Steve Stern and Karen Tidbeck.

The Uncanny Valley…“…is a macabre serenade to a small town that may or may not exist, peopled with alive and dead denizens who wander about the hills and houses with creepy fluidity. Told by individual inhabitants, the stories recount tales of disappearing dead deer, enchanted gardens, invisible killer dogs, and rattlesnakes that fall from the sky; each contribution adds to a composite portrait that skitters between eerie, ghoulish, and poignant. Miller is a master storyteller, clearly delighting in his mischievous creations.”Thirty-Three Tales. Thirty-Three Tellers. One Lost Town.