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Learning From Picturebooks: Perspectives From Child Development and Literacy Studies ed. by Bettina Kümmerling-Meibauer et al. (review)

obedience in response to varying contexts of production and reception. The second section focuses on adaptations that utilize Cinderella as a site of feminist, homosexual, and queer resistance—subverting a text that had, over time, robbed its female protagonist of agency. Babette Cole’s Prince Cinders is the object of analysis for Jennifer Orme, who uses Judith Halberstam’s concept of queer failure to read the trickster figure of the fairy godmother in the text, arguing that she is the truly queer element in a text that only superficially reverses gender roles. Roxane Hughes’s essay presents the sole instance of sustained engagement with non-Western versions of Cinderella, though it is through an American text: Napoli’s Bound, which is set in Ming China in the sixteenth century and presents an empowered heroine. The final section looks at Cinderella in visual media, be they illustrations, posters, or film. Of note in this section is Xenia Mitrokhina’s exploration of Cinderella as a working-class Everywoman in the Soviet Union’s radical communist revisions of fairy and folk tales. The editors make it amply clear in the introduction that the “new directions” taken imply a poststructural approach, delineating this collection from its well-known precursor, Alan Dundes’ Cinderella: A Casebook. Whereas Dundes’ 1982 collection responded to the dominant structural paradigm in folkloristics at the time, seeing deviant interpretations as “alternative readings,” it is precisely these approaches that find a central place in Cinderella across Cultures. There is less of a drive to identify common archetypes and motifs: the Aarne-Thompson-Uther classification of folk narratives is all but denounced as the focus is shifted to an exploration of how each version “speaks to a particular moment, context and audience” (de la Rochère et al. 16). Moreover, since folklore exists in the liminal space between adult and children’s literature, many of the essays address moments of transmutation where Cinderella is recast, in turn, as a burlesque tale for the instruction of aristocratic youth by Perrault, as a retelling of a rustic folktale by the Grimm brothers, and as a didactic and sanitized children’s fairy tale taught in English schools. In this perspective, Cinderella is a floating signifier; indeed, the essays demonstrate that few elements of the narrative have remained stable over time. Nevertheless, one is still tempted to ask “what is Cinderella?” much as Eagleton asked “what is literature?” Is it simply a matter of consensus in a specific cultural context, or are there certain defining elements across all the transformations? Jack Zipes’ concluding essay about “Cinderella’s Legacy” indicates that the idea of the “triumph of the underdog” may be it. However, in his examination of the cinematic discourse around Cinderella, he warns that even this seemingly essential trope has begun to be perceived as outdated in its elements of passive virtue and melodramatic aesthetics. It is yet again time for a radical refashioning of Cinderella in response to shifting socio-cultural paradigms. All the essays make meaningful contributions towards a coherent and well-rounded collection, but one criticism remains: in a volume that so overtly revels in difference, the modality of race is conspicuously absent. In the context of Disney’s dubious efforts at racially inclusive fairy tales, and given that there is a good body of scholarship on the topic, it would have been pertinent to devote a section to the racial and intersectional dynamics of the Cinderella narrative, acknowledging the class-race-gender triad that has become so fundamental to critical scholarship today.