'Bluebeard,' the tale of a sadistic husband who murders his wives and locks away their bodies, has inspired hundreds of adaptations since it first appeared in 1697. In Bluebeard Gothic, Heta Pyrhönen argues that Charlotte Brontë's 1847 classic Jane Eyre can be seen as one such adaptation, and that although critics have been slow to realize the connection, authors rewriting Brontë's novel have either intuitively or intentionally seized on it. Pyrhönen begins by establishing that the story of Jane Eyre is intermingled with the 'Bluebeard' tale, as young Jane moves between households, each dominated by its own Bluebeard figure. She then considers rewritings of Jane Eyre, such as Jean Rhys' Wide Sargasso Sea (1966) and Diane Setterfield's The Thirteenth Tale (2006), to examine how novelists have interpreted the status and meaning of 'Bluebeard' in Brontë's novel. Using psychoanalysis as the primary model of textual analysis, Bluebeard Gothic focuses on the conjunction of religion, sacrifice, and scapegoating to provide an original interpretation of a canonical and frequently-studied text.

Art of Darkness is an ambitious attempt to describe the principles governing Gothic literature. Ranging across five centuries of fiction, drama, and verse—including tales as diverse as Horace Walpole's The Castle of Otranto, Shelley's Frankenstein, Coleridge's The Rime of the Ancient Mariner, and Freud's The Mysteries of Enlightenment—Anne Williams proposes three new premises: that Gothic is "poetic," not novelistic, in nature; that there are two parallel Gothic traditions, Male and Female; and that the Gothic and the Romantic represent a single literary tradition. Building on the psychoanalytic and feminist theory of Julia Kristeva, Williams argues that Gothic conventions such as the haunted castle and the family curse signify the fall of the patriarchal family; Gothic is therefore "poetic" in Kristeva's sense because it reveals those "others" most often identified with the female. Williams identifies distinct Male and Female Gothic traditions: In the Male plot, the protagonist faces a cruel, violent, and supernatural world, without hope of salvation. The Female plot, by contrast, asserts the power of the mind to comprehend a world which, though mysterious, is ultimately sensible. By showing how Coleridge and Keats used both Male and Female Gothic, Williams challenges accepted notions about gender and authorship among the Romantics. Lucidly and gracefully written, Art of Darkness alters our understanding of the Gothic tradition, of Romanticism, and of the relations between gender and genre in literary history.

This project provides an in-depth study of narratives about Bluebeard and his wives, or narratives with identifiable Bluebeard motifs, and the intertextual and extratextual personal, political, literary, and sociocultural factors that have made the tale a particularly fertile ground for an author's adaptation of the story. Whereas Charles Dickens, for example, expresses a sympathetic identification with Bluebeard, and a discernable strain of misogyny emerges in his recreation of the tale and recurrent allusions to it, his contemporary, William Makepeace Thackeray, uses the tale as a springboard for his critique of avarice, hypocrisy, pretension, and the subjugation of women in Victorian society.

Bluebeard is the main character in one of the grisliest and most enduring fairy tales. A serial wife murderer, he keeps a horror chamber in which remains of all his previous matrimonial victims are secreted from his latest bride. She is given all the keys but forbidden to open one door of the castle. This is a major study of the tale and its many variants in English: from the 18th and 19th century chapbooks, children's toybooks, pantomimes, melodramas, and circus spectaculars, to the 20th century in music, literature, art, film, and theatre.

Postmodern revisions of fairy tales have influenced several discourses and disciplines especially during the second half of the twentieth century. In particular, during the course of postmodernism, the rewriting of classic fairy tales has contributed to the subversion of their stereotypical structures, thus advancing alternative re-readings. This work offers an investigation into gender discourse in two postmodern re-writings of Bluebeard, namely Margaret Atwood’s “Bluebeard’s Egg” and Shirley Hazzard’s The Transit of Venus, especially focusing on male/queer perspectives that have not yet been taken into consideration. Starting from an overview on the diverse conceptualisations of the terms “gender” and “sexuality” in modern and contemporary times, this book analyses the birth and evolution of male studies and, subsequently, explores the ways in which they have influenced the interpretation of classical tales. By means of an intertwined and shifting process, which enables the characters of these contemporary revisions to “disguise” their identities within the pages and beyond their texts, the figure of Bluebeard reveals himself as the “in-between” pattern for contemporary gender conceptualisations.

This study offers a theory for feminist intertextuality based on strategies at work in rewritings of the Bluebeard fairy tale. The book asserts that feminist intertextuality revises one coercive intertext in particular: that of intertextuality theory itself. Rewritings of the fairy tale accordingly can be seen to privilege either the embedded narrative or the escape from it, subscribing either to monologic or dialogic intertextuality. The work examines the original Bluebeard tale group (Perrault, Grimm, variants); historical and modern Bluebeards; and other writers, including Jane Austen, William Godwin, Margaret Atwood, John Fowles, Peter Ackroyd, Kurt Vonnegut, Angela Carter, Gloria Naylor, Emma Cave, Max Frisch, Stephen King, Meira Cook and Donald Barthelme.

Lynne Tatlock examines the transmission, diffusion, and literary survival of Jane Eyre in the German-speaking territories and the significance and effects thereof, 1848-1918. Engaging with scholarship on the romance novel, she presents an historical case study of the generative power and protean nature of Brontë's new romance narrative in German translation, adaptation, and imitation as it involved multiple agents, from writers and playwrights to readers, publishers, illustrators, reviewers, editors, adaptors, and translators. Jane Eyre in German Lands traces the ramifications in the paths of transfer that testify to widespread creative investment in romance as new ideas of women's freedom and equality topped the horizon and sought a home, especially in the middle classes. As Tatlock outlines, the multiple German instantiations of Brontë's novel-four translations, three abridgments, three adaptations for general readers, nine adaptations for younger readers, plays, farces, and particularly the fiction of the popular German writer E. Marlitt and its many adaptations-evince a struggle over its meaning and promise. Yet precisely this multiplicity (repetition, redundancy, and proliferation) combined with the romance narrative's intrinsic appeal in the decades between the March Revolutions and women's franchise enabled the cultural diffusion, impact, and long-term survival of Jane Eyre as German reading. Though its focus on the circulation of texts across linguistic boundaries and intertwined literary markets and reading cultures, Jane Eyre in German Lands unsettles the national paradigm of literary history and makes a case for a fuller and inclusive account of the German literary field.

Exploring the literary microcosm inspired by Brontë's debut novel, Jane Eyre's Fairytale Legacy at Home and Abroad focuses on the nationalistic stakes of the mythic and fairytale paradigms that were incorporated into the heroic female bildungsroman tradition. Jane Eyre, Abigail Heiniger argues, is a heroic changeling indebted to the regional, pre-Victorian fairy lore Charlotte Brontë heard and read in Haworth, an influence that Brontë repudiates in her last novel, Villette. While this heroic figure inspired a range of female writers on both sides of the Atlantic, Heiniger suggests that the regional aspects of the changeling were especially attractive to North American writers such as Susan Warner and L.M. Montgomery who responded to Jane Eyre as part of the Cinderella tradition. Heiniger contrasts the reactions of these white women writers with that of Hannah Crafts, whose Jane Eyre-influenced The Bondwoman's Narrative rejects the Cinderella model. Instead, Heiniger shows, Crafts creates a heroic female bildungsroman that critiques fairytale narratives from the viewpoint of the obscure, oppressed workers who remain forever outside the tales of wonder produced for middle-class consumption. Heiniger concludes by demonstrating how Brontë's middle-class American readers projected the self-rise ethic onto Jane Eyre, miring the novel in nineteenth-century narratives of American identity formation.

Fear in its many facets appears to constitute an intriguing and compelling subject matter for writers and screenwriters alike. The contributions address fictional representations and explorations of fear in different genres and different periods of literary and cultural history. The topics include representations of political violence and political fear in English Renaissance culture and literature; dramatic representations of fear and anxiety in English Romanticism; the dramatic monologue as an expression of fears in Victorian society; cultural constructions of fear and empathy in George Eliot's Daniel Deronda (1876) and Jonathan Nasaw's Fear Itself (2003); facets of children's fears in twentieth- and twenty-first-century stream-of-consciousness fiction; the representation of fear in war movies; the cultural function of horror film remakes; the expulsion of fear in Kazuo Ishiguro's novel Never Let Me Go and fear and nostalgia in Mohsin Hamid's post-9/11 novel The Reluctant Fundamentalist.

Encyclopedic in its coverage, this one-of-a-kind reference is ideal for students, scholars, and others who need reliable, up-to-date information on folk and fairy tales, past and present. Folktales and fairy tales have long played an important role in cultures around the world. They pass customs and lore from generation to generation, provide insights into the peoples who created them, and offer inspiration to creative artists working in media that now include television, film, manga, photography, and computer games. This second, expanded edition of an award-winning reference will help students and teachers as well as storytellers, writers, and creative artists delve into this enchanting world and keep pace with its past and its many new facets. Alphabetically organized and global in scope, the work is the only multivolume reference in English to offer encyclopedic coverage of this subject matter. The four-volume collection covers national, cultural, regional, and linguistic traditions from around the world as well as motifs, themes, characters, and tale types. Writers and illustrators are included as are filmmakers and composers—and, of course, the tales themselves. The expert entries within volumes 1 through 3 are based on the latest research and developments while the contents of volume 4 comprises tales and texts. While most books either present readers with tales from certain countries or cultures or with thematic entries, this encyclopedia stands alone in that it does both, making it a truly unique, one-stop resource.