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Tales move. Their portability has been so ubiquitous as to be occasionally imperceptible. Their motivations so apparently mundane as to be regularly overlooked. Like the tales' protagonists, the form's fortunes rise and fall and rise. For example, in his foreword to Pauline Greenhill and Sidney Eve Matrix's Fairy Tale Films, Jack Zipes observes that fairy tale is not referenced in the 1996 Oxford History of World Cinema (ix). Greenhill and Matrix acknowledge that some may see the study of fairy-tale film to be associated with "diversionary kid stuff, or at worst, [the] utterly facile, predictable, disposable" ("Introduction," 22). Yet the fall is never long or far because tales keep moving. Because people keep telling them. Because people keep wondering about them. And they rise once more, as with the current vogue for fairy-tale film and TV
Fascination with these always-transforming traditional forms inspires questions and sparks scholarship. Such explorations have fostered methodologies and theories from field collecting and archiving to historic-geographic tracing and motif indexes to sociohistorical contexts and ideological critique. Yet what remains at stake in consideration of fairy-tale transmission and the concept of the transcultural is what Donald Haase refers to in his crucial essay "Yours, Mine, or Ours" as the "ownership of fairy tales" (353). Do individuals or groups own tales? face-to-face communal groups? lower, middle, or upper classes? nationstates? globalized media conglomerates? YouTubers? tellers, authors, producers, listeners, readers, viewers, fans? Can anyone own such familiar shape-shifters? Or, as Arthur Frank asks, could stories own people-emplot their lives, capture their actions as well as their imaginations? These are questions explored implicitly and sometimes explicitly in this special issue.
The powers and possibilities of communication also remain at stake in consideration of fairy-tale transmission and the concept of intermediality. Ten years ago a 2007 Marvels & Tales special issue focused on origins and transmission through the theme of fairy tales, printed texts, and oral tellings (Bottigheimer). Its subject echoed the first statement of editorial policy from the inaugural issue in 1987, which promised articles on literary fairy tales and folktales and reprinted "oral as well as written examples" ("Statement," 1). However, in 1997, when the journal transferred from Jacques Barchilon and the University of Colorado to Haase's editorship at Wayne State University, the...