Abigail Heiniger – författare

Exploring the literary microcosm inspired by Brontë's debut novel, Jane Eyre's Fairytale Legacy at Home and Abroad focuses on the nationalistic stakes of the mythic and fairytale paradigms that were incorporated into the heroic female bildungsroman tradition. Jane Eyre, Abigail Heiniger argues, is a heroic changeling indebted to the regional, pre-Victorian fairy lore Charlotte Brontë heard and read in Haworth, an influence that Brontë repudiates in her last novel, Villette. While this heroic figure inspired a range of female writers on both sides of the Atlantic, Heiniger suggests that the regional aspects of the changeling were especially attractive to North American writers such as Susan Warner and L.M. Montgomery who responded to Jane Eyre as part of the Cinderella tradition. Heiniger contrasts the reactions of these white women writers with that of Hannah Crafts, whose Jane Eyre-influenced The Bondwoman's Narrative rejects the Cinderella model. Instead, Heiniger shows, Crafts creates a heroic female bildungsroman that critiques fairytale narratives from the viewpoint of the obscure, oppressed workers who remain forever outside the tales of wonder produced for middle-class consumption. Heiniger concludes by demonstrating how Brontë's middle-class American readers projected the self-rise ethic onto Jane Eyre, miring the novel in nineteenth-century narratives of American identity formation.

This two-volume collection includes fairy tales produced by African American, Caribbean, Irish, and other marginalized authors in the Anglophone world. These tales are a part of the expanding cartographies of the fairy-tale world during the long nineteenth-century.While new collections devoted to emerging minority writers include some new and exciting fairy tales, this collection is particularly interested in demonstrating the historic nature of this tradition. Minority writers have been creating fairy tales alongside mainstream authors since the golden age of the fairy tales. Many of these stories have been overlooked because they are embedded in a range of literary genres, including novels, dramas, poems and lyrics. This collection mines these fairy tales and makes out-of-print or otherwise relatively inaccessible marginalized fairy tales available to a new generation of scholars. Fairy Tales from the Margins is essential to moving fairy-tale studies beyond its current boundaries, which also limit the field’s current theories and ideologies. While some written collections are beginning to include fairy tales by historically marginalized writers, there are no collections dedicated to the fairy tales produced by marginalized writers or people of color, particularly during the nineteenth century. And there are no online collections of these distinctive fairy tales. This collection breaks new ground in the field of fairy-tale studies and will allow scholars and researchers to engage with issues that are becoming urgent in an era of rising racial tensions. This study expands upon the long-standing connections between Scottish, Welsh, Irish, African American, and Caribbean revival movements, demonstrating the ways fairy tales are incorporated into earlier forms of ethnic protest literature.This collection is divided by tale types, to demonstrate the wide range of responses to a single tale or group of fairy tales. These divisions rely loosely on the traditional Aarne-Thompson-Uther classification system. Although these tales are primarily written by own-voice authors, a few out-of-print collections of recorded oral tales are also included to demonstrate the longevity of these tales outside mainstream traditions where print traditions are not available.

This collection opens with marginalized responses to the highly politicized Cinderella traditions in the Anglophone world. In the United States, Cinderella was incorporated into the gendered narrative of the American Dream and narratives of empire in the colonial world, particularly in the mid-1800s. Marginalized writers have responded to these nationalistic colonial traditions in two distinctive ways: clever Cinderellas who negotiate a broken system or passive Cinderellas who die as anti-heroes in disenchanting fairy tales. This dual tradition of marginalized Cinderellas is also apparent across the Anglophone world. Potential texts include the out-of-print works of Sinèad de Valera, excerpts from the novels of Hannah Crafts, Jessie Fauset, and Julia Kavanagh, along with dramas by Ann Devlin, and collected oral tales.

Volume two explores the way a wide range of classic princess tales written by marginalized writers. Rapunzel and Snow White, with their pale skin or long ropes of golden hair, are particularly popular vehicles for exploring and challenging racialized constructions of beauty. Marriage is the traditional vehicle of a happy ending in Princess tales, so marginalized responses to these tales also inherently respond to the doubly colonized position of women in the Anglophone world. The institution of marriage typically exposes the institutional oppression of colonized women. Authors include Charles Chesnutt, Jessie Fauset, Julia Kavanaugh, George Edwards, some of the unpublished manuscripts of Jewish-Australian author Joseph Jacobs, and the earliest work of Sinèad de Valera, as well as fin-de-siècle illustrators such as Harry Clarke, and collected oral tales.