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Cinderella across Cultures: New Directions and Interdisciplinary Perspectives. Ed. Martine Hennard Dutheil de la Rochere, Gillian Lathey, and Monika Woźniak. (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 2016. Pp. xvi + 421, foreword by Cristina Bacchilega, acknowledgments, introduction, notes, works cited, 12 color and 31 black-and-white plates, bios, index.)
Cinderella is ubiquitous and seems universal, a fitting synecdoche for the fairy tale itself. That is the role she plays in Cinderella across Cultures, a volume designed to show that every iteration of this "universal" plot is nonetheless the product of "specific historical, geographical, sociocultural, political, economic and material circumstances, as well as discursive, literary, and mediatic ec(h)o-system(s)" (p. 2).
The result of an international conference in Rome in 2012, the volume examines a host of global Cinderellas that dialogue with each other and also diverge from each other in fascinating ways. In the spirit of Revisioning Red Riding Hood around the World (Wayne State university Press, 2013), by Sandra Beckett, a contributor to this volume, Cinderella across Cultures finds examples outside of Western Europe and across media forms. And it does more than introduce the reader to critical approaches in the fashion of a Dundes casebook. Editors Martine Hennard Dutheil de la Rochere, Gillian Lathey, and Monika Woźniak invite the reader to rethink how fairy-tale studies does its work.
As they explain in the introduction, the 18 contributions to the anthology work together to "de-theologize" the default categories (type/ variant, oral/literary) of fairy/folktale studies and instead interrogate stories in "the palimpsestic, transformative, performative, and creative dimension of each retelling" (p. 14). They consider Cinderella's many "deterritorializations" (p. 15) beyond the wellworn path from Basile to Perrault to the Grimms and within webs of local influence and meaning. Essays "decolonize" (p. 16) the fairy tale by finding Cinderella in the form of objects, posters, spectacles, and film; a few are visible in vibrant color inserts.
In three parts, the volume (re)contextualizes, regenders, and visualizes the Cinderella tale in different historical and cultural environments. Sections have lead titles but no introductions, which allows the threads of the disparate essays to remain unbound, a welcome decision in a volume that seeks to undo facile categories. In Part I, "Contextualizing Cinderella," essays retell the history of Charles Perrault's 1697 version of...