The Feminist Architecture of Postmodern Anti-Tales

This monograph aims to counter the assumption that the anti-tale is a ?subversive twin? or dark side of the fairy tale coin, instead it argues that the anti-tale is a genre rich in complexity and radical potential that fundamentally challenges the damaging ideologies and socializing influence of fairy tales.

The Feminist Architecture of Postmodern Anti-Tales: Space, Time and Bodies highlights how anti-tales take up timely debates about revising old structures, opening our minds up to a broader spectrum of experience or ways of viewing the world and its inhabitants. They show us alternative architectures for the future by deconstructing established spatio-temporal laws and structures, as well as limited ideas surrounding the body, and ultimately liberate us from the shackles of a single-minded and simplistic masculine reality currently upheld by dominant social forces and patriarchal fairy tales themselves. It is only when these masculine fairy tales and social architectures are deconstructed that new, more inclusive feminine realities and futures can be brought into being.

This monograph excels in offering original close-reading analyses of a selection ofpostmillennial speculative fantastic narratives. The four chapters pursue an innovativeagenda by tracing the kaleidoscopic patterns of contemporary fictional attempts atreimagining notions of space, time, and body, while revindicating the validity of the genericcategory "postmodern feminist anti-tale". -- Dr habil Anna Kérchy, Associate Professor,University of Szeged, Hungary