In this wide-ranging and insightful analysis, Stephen Benson
proposes a poetics of narrative for postmodernism by placing new
emphasis on the folktale. Postmodernist fictions have evidenced a
return to narrative -- to storytelling centered on a sequence of
events, rather than a "spiraling" of events as found in modernism
-- and recent theorists have described narrative as a "central
instance of the human mind." By characterizing the folktale as a
prime embodiment of narrative, Benson relates folktales to many of
the theoretical concerns of postmodernism and provides new insights
into the works of major writers who have used this genre, which
includes the subgenre of the fairy tale, in opening narrative up to
new possibilities.
Benson begins by examining the key features of folktales: their
emphasis on a chain of events rather than description or
consciousness, their emphasis on a self-contained fictional
environment rather than realism, the presence of a storyteller as a
self-confessed fabricator, their oral and communal status, and
their ever-changing state, which defies authoritative versions. He
traces the interactions between the folktale and Italo Calvino's
Fiabe Italiane, between selected fictions of John Barth and the
Arabian Nights, between the work of Robert Coover and the subgenre
of the fairy tale, and between the "Bluebeard" stories and recent
feminist retellings by Angela Carter and Margaret Atwood. The
arguments presented will interest not only folklorists and scholars
of narrative but also readers in fields ranging from comparative
literature to feminist theory.
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