Literary critic Kate Bernheimer defines a fairy tale as “a story with a fairy-tale feel,” Park and Heaton (1992) referred to “tales” as employing “elements and echoes of the traditional fairy tale embedded in the narrative like so many fragments, as if the old tales had fractured under immense pressure,” and Cristina Pantoja-Hidalgo has this to say about what constitutes as a “tale”:
Language: a cadence and rhythm; a focusing on the fanciful or whimsical detail rather than the mundane, or a playful tweaking of the mundane so that it seems strange; the collapsing of time, so that each narrative covers many years, sometimes a whole lifetime, unlike the “slice of life” which characterizes the modern short story; and the narrator’s voice—there is always a narrator—usually speaking in the third person, a few paces away—or many generations away—from the action, creating distance, bestowing wisdom. So all these stratagems or techniques—whatever one chooses to call them—cast the spell that creates enchantment. And so, though the hero be a giddy courtier or the heroine a frumpy housewife, they become creatures of mystery and wonder.
Are there any other modern writers who have written collections of what can be considered “modern fairy tales”? Two examples I can think of are A. S. Byatt (The Djinn in the Nightingale’s Eye) and Isak Dinesen (Seven Gothic Tales). Some stories of Gabriel García Márquez such as A Very Old Man with Enormous Wings can do since magical realism has an overlap with the given criteria.
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