AustLit

'This dissertation contributes to scholarship on contemporary fairy-tale retellings by exploring how gender is conceptualized, or not, as an unstable construct through specific narrative strategies. The texts I analyze are primarily American literary fiction and films, aimed at adults and young adults, from the past twenty years. I argue that narrative strategies affect the way gender is conceptualized in retellings even if they do not directly engage with gender concepts on the level of story. I suggest that gender conceptualization and narrative structures can work in concert, in opposition, or by revealing alternate possibilities, and I focus on the complexity with which retellings re-envision traditional fairy tales - paying particular attention to plot, narration, and metafiction. My purpose is to show how gender ideologies and narrative structures interact, and I conclude that the more disruptive the narrative strategies are to fairy-tale patterns, the more enabled the retelling is to question gender as a concept. ' (Abstract)