Kate Koppy, NES Assistant Professor at the Department of Humanities and Languages, has released a new book Fairy Tales in Contemporary American Culture: How We Hate to Love Them.
While American culture is experiencing a profound shift toward pluralism and secularization in the twenty-first century, Kate Koppy argues that the increasing popularity and presence of fairy tales within American culture is both indicative of and contributing to this shift. By analyzing contemporary fairy tale texts as both new versions in a particular tale type and as wholly new fairy-tale pastiches, she shows that fairy tales have become a key part of American secular scripture, a corpus of shared stories that work to maintain a sense of community among diverse audiences in the United States, as much as biblical scripture and associated texts used to.
The book seeks to understand the proliferation of fairy tales - in children’s picture books, in young adult fantasy novels, in popular literature, and on screens large and small - as well as the proliferation of harsh fairy tale critiques - in parenting advice publications, in religious magazines, and in feminist scholarship. Arguments about the value of fairy tales in contemporary American society intersect with arguments about how to raise children to be good adults, about the place of faith in society, about the false dichotomy between faith and science, about evangelical Christians’ persecution complex. Kate Koppy doesn’t offer prescriptive answers to these questions, but she does reframe the conversation to include the intersections among them.
The author argues that fairy-tale adaptations and retellings should be examined alongside and in conversation with the canonical literary and cinematic texts of the long twentieth century. If we fail to examine fairy tales and their role in shaping American narratives of selfhood and nationhood, we risk missing that we are a culture that needs the fantastic to make sense of our past and to imagine our future. Fairy tales are the common stories we share across ethnic and religious divisions.
The book is now available for pre-sale with a projected print date of February 15, 2021. More about the book here.