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The Disney Middle Ages: A Fairy-Tale and Fantasy Past. Edited by Tison Pugh and Susan Aronstein. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012. 283 pp.
The Disney Middle Ages: A Fairy-Tale and Fantasy Past, a volume in the New Middle Ages series of criticism, is an uneven but overall thought-provoking collection of essays that examines the conjunction between Disney and medievalism from several angles. One major strength of the collection is that it does not concentrate wholly on the most expected angle, the Disney princess phenomenon. However, this strength is simultaneously a weakness, because the most problematic chapters here seem to be trying too hard to discuss anything but princesses, in the process shoehorning Disney's properties into "medieval" topics that do not entirely fit them.
The book is divided into three theme-based sections. The first deals with the Disney theme parks, the second with a number of nonprincess films and their approaches to history, and the third with the figure of the Disney princess. Part i is the shortest, containing only three chapters, all quite strong. stephen Yandell examines the layout and mapping of the theme parks in light of the properties of the Hereford T-O map. At times, the argument seems to be a stretch, but it is ultimately convincing in its discussion of how the maps function to create control out of chaos, writing a "perfect" story meant to obscure an imperfect world while simultaneously drawing attention to the "forbidden" areas of the park by obscuring their content. Yandell does, however, skim over certain issues-such as his Christ/Mickey Mouse parallel-that threaten to complicate his thesis....