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 * The Donald Haase Series in Fairy-Tale Studies
 * literary criticism
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 * Specters of the Marvelous

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SPECTERS OF THE MARVELOUS


RACE AND THE DEVELOPMENT OF THE EUROPEAN FAIRY TALE

by Kimberly J. Lau

Series edited by Anne E. Duggan

242 Pages

 * Hardcover
 * 9780814351536
 * Publication Date: December 2024

$94.99

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 * Paperback
 * 9780814341346
 * Publication Date: December 2024

$34.99

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 * Description
 * Authors
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DESCRIPTION

A transformative lens revealing the historical racial context that profoundly
influenced European fairy tales.

In stories retold for generations, wondrous worlds and magnificent characters
have defined the genre of European fairy tales with little recognition of yet
another defining aspect—racism and racialized thinking. Engaging four classic
fairy-tale collections, author Kimberly J. Lau connects close readings of the
tales to the cultural discourses, scholarly debates, and imperial geopolitics
that established and perpetuated ideas about racial difference and white
superiority. Within the tales of Giambattista Basile, Marie-Catherine d'Aulnoy,
the Grimms, and Andrew and Nora Lang, Lau teases apart and historicizes the
racialized themes and ideologies embedded within fairy tales spanning the early
seventeenth to early twentieth centuries. She contends that the European fairy
tale is definitively marked, whether implicitly or explicitly, by whiteness, and
given the genre's documented colonization of diverse narrative traditions over
time, this specter of race is all the more haunting. This trailblazing work
demonstrates the continuous evolution of racialized thinking that has informed
the publication and dissemination of fairy tales. Here, Lau provides a new
framework for understanding European fairy tales in the milieux in which they
were created, bringing distant and ethereal worlds back to earth.


AUTHORS

Kimberly J. Lau is a professor of literature at the University of California,
Santa Cruz. She is the author of Erotic Infidelities: Love and Enchantment in
Angela Carter's "The Bloody Chamber" (Wayne State University Press), Body
Language: Sisters in Shape, Black Women's Fitness, and Feminist Identity
Politics, and New Age Capitalism: Making Money East of Eden, as well as articles
in a number of interdisciplinary journals. Her research interests include fairy
tales, folklore, and fantasy; feminist theory and critical race studies; and the
intersection of popular and political cultures.




PRAISE

> Fairy-tale studies has needed this book for a long time. With meticulous
> historical and narrative analysis, Kimberly J. Lau lays out a consummate
> reckoning of racism in the European tale tradition. The unmarked, naturalized,
> inevitable whiteness of the tales is thoroughly debunked. This is literary
> litigation at its finest. A world of assumptions unmasked by a scholar who is
> also an intrepid investigator working at the highest level of commitment to
> giving us new truths about the old stories that still shape our worldview.
> 
> 
> ~Kay Turner, coeditor of Transgressive Tales: Queering the Grimms (Wayne State
> University Press), and founder of the What a Witch project

> In eye-opening ways, Specters of the Marvelous: Race and the Development of
> the European Fairy Tale does for fairy tales what Ebony Elizabeth Thomas's The
> Dark Fantastic did for fantasy and Isiah Lavender III's Race in American
> Science Fiction did for science fiction. We do not have to agree with every
> one of Kimberly J. Lau's interpretations, but it is impossible after reading
> this carefully researched book to unsee the workings of racial ideologies and
> representations in foundational European literary collections of fairy tales,
> and it is clear how insisting on the power of non-Euro-American wonder genres
> counters that history—and matters today. This distinctive contribution to
> viewing fairy-tale history and intersectionality is a must-read in fairy-tale
> studies.
> 
> 
> ~Cristina Bacchilega, professor emerita, University of Hawai'i at Mānoa, and
> coeditor of Marvels & Tales: Journal of Fairy-Tale Studies (Wayne State
> University Press)


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