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Fairy Tale Interrupted: Feminism, Masculinity, Wonder Cinema. By Allison Craven, Peter Lang, 2017, 254 pp.
With dizzying scope, Allison Craven presents a number of ideas about "Beauty and the Beast" (both the fairy-tale text in early French manifestations and the 1991 animated Disney film of the same name); about the intricacies of feminist theory, masculinity studies, postfeminism, and the men's mythopoetic movement; and about the gendered balances of power in various contemporary live-action fairy-tale films. That she attempts to do so in a single book is ambitious and, in my opinion, not entirely feasible. Still, her book yields insights for scholars wanting hot takes on the various fairy-tale films that hit the screen in the early 2010s, on intertextual connections between "Beauty and the Beast" retellings, and specifically on Australian contributions to feminist theory.
At the book's heart, Craven is concerned with the gender politics of fairytale films, leading to incisive observations about the animated film. For example, "As a (Disney) feminist, Belle is a reformist, critical of Gaston's masculinity, but surprisingly tolerant of the worse aspects of Beast's" (211). Organized into three sections, the book opens with a lengthy introduction that I had to reread parts of in order to get the gist of its assembly. The first section, "Retelling 'Beauty and the Beast' in the 1990s," walks us through major pre-texts for the animated Disney film and chronicles some of Disney's major changes to the traditional plot. However, I did not see one reference to tale types, which baffled me. The second section, "Arcade," tours feminist theory and how both femininity and masculinity have been imagined in the...