Retelling Stories, Framing Culture: Traditional Story and Metanarratives in Children's Literature

by John Stephens, Robyn McCallum

What happens to traditional stories when they are retold in another time and cultural context and for a different audience? This first-of-its-kind study discusses Bible stories, classical myths, heroic legends, Arthurian romances, Robin Hood lore, folk tales, 'oriental' tales, and other stories derived from European cultures. One chapter is devoted to various retellings of classics, from Shakespeare to "Wind in the Willows."
The authors offer a general theory of what motivates the retelling of stories, and how stories express the aspirations of a society. An important function of stories is to introduce children to a cultural heritage, and to transmit a body of shared allusions and experiences that expresses a society's central values and assumptions. However, the cultural heritage may be modified through a pervasive tendency of retellings to produce socially conservative outcomes because of ethnocentric, androcentric and class-based assumptions in the source stories that persist into retellings. Therefore, some stories, such as classical myths, are particularly resistant to feminist reinterpretations, for example, while other types, such as folktales, are more malleable. In examining such possibilities, the book evaluates the processes of interpretation apparent in retellings. Index included.

Genres: Nonfiction, Childrens

316 pages, Hardcover

First published June 29, 1998

About the author

Librarian Note: There is more than one author in the Goodreads database with this name.

John Stephens is Professor in English at Macquarie University, Australia

Reviews

[Darceylaine]

This is so right up my alley. I never studied the academics of story and meta-narrative in school, and this is already a useful explanation. (moreover, in the first chapter they've mentioned Terry Pratchett and Tamora Pierce, two of my favorite reversion-ers of story.)

I only got about half way through the book before the library recalled it- but found it very illuminating. Too bad it's $150, I'd love to own a copy.