I’m going to mull this over and see if I’m inspired. There have been some great fairy tale retellings (with Beauty and the Beast, Red Riding Hood, and Cinderella probably the most popular source material).
Bear in mind that these are stories that have been around for a long time and been polished like stones in a stream; Cinderella is known from Europe to China in various versions, and there’s supposedly one story that goes back to the Bronze Age.
Kenley Davidson and W.R. Gingell have done some lovely ones.
I think a fairy tale boxed set should be a thing.
My only issue with the idea is that most fairy tales known to modern audiences have some deeply embedded sexist and classist bullshit. There’s obvious stuff to address, but when you get down into the bones of it, you find deeper layers of hegemonic crap. And if you keep digging and fixing and digging and fixing, pretty soon it’s no longer recognizable as a fairy tale, so what was the point in the first place?
Yeah, that’s my hesitation too, Josh Roby. Though there’s also a strong tradition of subverting exactly those elements in fairy tales when you retell them. Sherri Tepper’s Beauty comes to mind.
There are a lot of fairy tales out there; I wouldn’t dismiss them all so abruptly, esp. when many of the storytellers were (anonymous) women, and these stories are their gifts to us from centuriest past. If you are looking for sources, I have lots of fairy tale and other traditional story books at this blog:
http://freebookapalooza.blogspot.com/
This type of retelling is what my classes are all about; this blog is the free online library for my classes.
Laura Gibbs There are a lot of folktales that subvert hegemonic power, they’re just less well-known. Most of the fairy tales we know come from 19th century collections (Grimm, Anderson), and they were heavily edited individually and harshly selected. Hence the strongly Victorian bent to a lot of the morals and structures.
Well, that’s true for Grimm (and they got more heavily edited over time), and Andersen is literary so he’s not really folktales at all (although some of his older stuff has a lot of folktale motifs). But that’s just a tiny tiny tiny part of the folktales and fairy tales that, glory hallelujah, were written down over the centuries. We are very lucky that so much of that is in the public domain, so people who want to broaden their traditional-storytelling horizons can do so. It’s just a click away.