UNIVERSITY This collection of twelve original essays explores the politics of tale-telling across the PRESS field of English Studies. A programmatic introduction uses the fuzzy boundaries of tales to argue that their indeterminacy and polymorphous quality is responsible for the endless attraction, proliferation, and transgressive potential of the ‘tale’ as a lite- rary form. The case studies address representative developments in British culture, focussing on the tales’ potential for cultural critique in literature, film, music and other cultural practices. Four sections cover ‘Shakespeare Retold’, ‘Victorian Tales’, ‘Fairy Tales Revisited’, and ‘Narrating (National/Cultural) Identity’. Topics include classic fairy tales and their rewritings; melodramatic, Gothic and fantasy fiction and film; writings about the condition of England and negotiations of Irish identity; discourses of Empire in public spectacles; and every-day life represented in popular music. On each of them hangs a tale. And Thereby Hangs a Tale: A Critical Anatomy of (Popular) Tales Hangs a Tale: And Thereby FAU Studien aus der Philosophischen Fakultät 15 Ina Habermann/Christian Krug (eds.) And Thereby Hangs a Tale ISBN 978-3-96147-342-7 A Critical Anatomy of (Popular) Tales FAU UNIVERSITY PRESS 2020 FAU Ina Habermann/Christian Krug Ina Habermann and Christian Krug (eds.) And Thereby Hangs a Tale A Critical Anatomy of (Popular) Tales FAU Studien aus der Philosophischen Fakultät Band 15 Herausgeber der Reihe: Prof. Dr. Michele C. Ferrari und Prof. Dr. Rainer Trinczek Ina Habermann and Christian Krug (eds.) And Thereby Hangs a Tale A Critical Anatomy of (Popular) Tales Erlangen FAU University Press 2020 Bibliografische Information der Deutschen Nationalbibliothek: Die Deutsche Nationalbibliothek verzeichnet diese Publikation in der Deutschen Nationalbibliografie; detaillierte bibliografische Daten sind im Internet über http://dnb.d-nb.de abrufbar. Bitte zitieren als Habermann, Ina; Krug, Christian (Hrsg.). 2020. And Thereby Hangs a Tale. A Critical Anatomy of (Popular) Tales. FAU Studien aus der Philosophischen Fakultät Band 15. Erlangen: FAU University Press. DOI: 10.25593/978-3-96147-343-4. Das Werk, einschließlich seiner Teile, ist urheberrechtlich geschützt. Die Rechte an allen Inhalten liegen bei ihren jeweiligen Autoren. Sie sind nutzbar unter der Creative-Commons-Lizenz BY. Der vollständige Inhalt des Buchs ist als PDF über den OPUS-Server der Friedrich-Alexander-Universität Erlangen-Nürnberg abrufbar: https://opus4.kobv.de/opus4-fau/home Bildnachweis Titelbild: Arthur Hughes, Illustration zu Christina Rossettis Speaking Likenesses (1874). Detail. British Library, Shelfmark: 12803.g.34. https://www.bl.uk/collection-items/speaking-likenesses-by- christina-rossetti. Public Domain. Verlag und Auslieferung: FAU University Press, Universitätsstraße 4, 91054 Erlangen Druck: docupoint GmbH ISBN: 978-3-96147-342-7 (Druckausgabe) eISBN: 978-3-96147-343-4 (Online-Ausgabe) ISSN: 2363-720X DOI: 10.25593/978-3-96147-343-4 For Doris Feldmann Table of Contents Illustrations ................................................................................................ v Dedication ................................................................................................ vii Introduction: And Thereby Hangs a (Critical) Tale Ina Habermann & Christian Krug ............................................................. 1 Part I: Shakespeare Retold En-tale-ments: Marina Warner’s Indigo and the Politics of Storytelling Tobias Döring ........................................................................................... 21 Tales (not) from Shakespeare: Shakespeare ‘Re-told’ for the 21st Century Sabine Schülting ....................................................................................... 37 Part II: Victorian Tales Midnight’s Children and Roaring Tigers: Religious Tales and Tales of Religion in Victorian India and Beyond Andreas Nehring ...................................................................................... 57 Wire For You, Or: Telegraphic Tales and Articulations of Love Nadine Böhm-Schnitker ........................................................................... 75 A Tale of Two Faces: Melodramatizing Jekyll and Hyde Susanne Scholz ......................................................................................... 93 iii Table of Contents Part III: Fairy Tales Revisited ‘The Gold Standard’ oF Victorian Fairy Tales: John Ruskin’s “The King of the Golden River” (1841/1850) and Christina Rossetti’s “Goblin Market” (1859/1862) Ulrike Dencovski .................................................................................... 109 Revisiting the Bloody Chamber: Transnational Bluebeard-Tales in Helen Oyeyemi’s Mr Fox (2011) and Guillermo del Toro’s Crimson Peak (2015) Susanne Gruss ........................................................................................ 125 Snow White of the (Un)Dead: Reading the Anita Blake: Vampire Hunter Series as Tales of Female Desire Karin Heiß .............................................................................................. 141 Part IV: Narrating (National/Cultural) Identity A Tale of Changing Times: H. E. Bates’ Oh! To be in England: Cultural Poetics and the Condition of England in 1963 Jürgen Kamm .......................................................................................... 163 Telling Tales of Empire in Contemporary British Popular Culture Lena Steveker ......................................................................................... 181 New Tales of Ireland: Claire Kilroy’s The Devil I Know and Anna Burns’ Milkman Joachim Frenk ........................................................................................ 197 Tales from Turnpike House: Pop Music and the Tradition of the Folk Ballad Tale Christian Huck ....................................................................................... 217 Contributors ........................................................................................... 237 iv Illustrations Cover Arthur Hughes, Illustration in Christina Rossetti, Speaking Likenesses [Detail]. London: Macmillan, 1874, p. 29. British Library, London, Shelfmark: 12803.g.34. https://www.bl.uk/ collection-items/speaking-likenesses-by-christina-rossetti. Public Domain. p. 89 “Development of Wireless Telegraphy. Scene in Hyde Park”, Punch, or The London Charivari, 26 December 1906, p. 451. Public Domain. p. 224 Album cover, Saint Etienne, Tales from Turnpike House. Sanc- tuary Records Group Ltd., 2005. p. 226 Photograph of Turnpike House. University of Edinburgh, Col- lege of Art, Tower Blocks Project, https://www.towerblock. eca.ed.ac.uk/sites/default/files/L21-37.jpg, licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License. Photograph by Miles Glendinning. p. 230 Single cover, Saint Etienne, “A Good Thing”. Sanctuary Rec- ords Group Ltd., 2005. v Dedication There are not many people – and as it is desirable that a story-teller and a story-reader should establish a mutual understanding as soon as possible, I beg it to be noticed that I confine this observation neither to young people nor to little people, but extend it to all conditions of people: little and big, young and old: yet growing up, or already growing down again – there are not, I say, many people who [do not like a good story, beautifully told.] This, with a small but significant change at the end, is the first sentence of Charles Dickens’s Christmas book The Chimes, published in 1844. We use it as a peg on which to hang our own tale because it was one oF the texts that helped popularize fairy tales in Britain in the 1840s (much later than on the continent). Dickens’ The Chimes, or John Ruskin’s “The King of the Golden River” (1841), were also instrumental in redefining the scope and function of (fairy) tales in the early 1840s (Feldmann/Tet- zeli 253, 260), and this volume is interested precisely in such reconfigu- rations oF tales at crucial moments in time. Doris Feldmann and Kurt Tetzeli von Rosador published a carefully prepared German translation of both texts in 1995, and this is a more specific reason why we chose to open with this quote. Der König des Goldenen Flusses. Fünf englische Märchen von armen und reichen Leuten collects stories that use the vehicle oF the (Fairy) tale For a Fictional, imaginative exploration oF social injustice that implies, or quite openly expresses, a social critique. In order to ensure that this critique reaches the ears, the minds and the hearts of Dickens’s implied readership, the Victorian middle-classes, ‘mutual understanding’ must instantly be established, as Dickens’s narrator emphasizes – an understanding that ideally obtains in the reciprocal communicative relationship between the teller and the reader of a tale. Through the way we have twisted the end of Dickens’s sentence, we would emphasize the crucial cultural im- portance of storytelling, alluding to the notion of homo narrans, and Mark Turner’s related argument that story and parable provide no less than the organising principle of the human mind, determining the way in which we make sense oF the world, and our lives. In The Chimes, as elsewhere, Dickens makes heavy use of parenthesis, chopping up sentences in order to create suspense, and using a language that trips over itself in its (carefully craFted) eagerness to convey meaning. Like the Ancient Mariner in Coleridge’s eponymous poem, who holds the vii Dedication wedding guest with his skinny hand and glittering