The Charity of Witches: Watching the Edges in Terry Pratchett’s Tiffany Aching Novels

Terry Pratchett’s final novel, The Shepherd’s Crown, was published months after his death in 2015. The novel concludes the story arc of Tiffany Aching, hero of the Discworld children’s/young adult novels that include The Wee Free Men (2003), A Hat Full of Sky (2004), Wintersmith (2006), and I Shall Wear Midnight (2010). The arc follows the heroine from the age of nine through her teenage years and although classified as children’s or young adult novels, the novels merge seamlessly with the adult Discworld series. The novels’ status within children’s literature is sustained by a thematic core: Tiffany grows up. Her negotiation of childhood and adolescence, however, is shaped less by the valorisation of youth and desire for fame and fortune than by the example of old women and their dedication to public service. These old women are witches and they mind the margins of their community, as renowned witch Esmeralda Weatherwax explains of their work: “There’re a lot of edges, more than people know. Between life and death, this world and the next, night and day, right and wrong...an’ they need watchin’. We watch ‘em, we guard the sum of things. And we never ask for any reward. That’s important” (Pratchett 2010c). This article investigates how Pratchett draws on the history of fairy tales about witches and old women with their varied traditions of care and preservation, and reaches a narrative conclusion for the young heroine that rejects traditional fairy tale resolutions of romance, fame, or fortune. Instead, he endorses the heroic and everyday work performed at the ‘edges.

Pedagogy and Other Unfortunate Events: Cheerful Nihilism in Popular Children’s Books

Teaching the difference between right and wrong has long been a pedagogical function ascribed to and demonstrated in children's books. Childhood itself is dominated by educational institutions, practices and theories; even the process of ageing is regulated by a child's schooling. Children's authors, perhaps as a consequence, often focus attention upon school, situating an articulation and dissemination of values within the educational sphere. Children's authors, however, sometimes reject imposed value constructions, creating nihilistic discourses with which to mock and rebuff pedagogical aims and practices. Lemony Snicket, for example, sends his unfortunate protagonists, the Baudelaire orphans, to boarding school in the fifth book of A Series of Unfortunate Events, The Austere Academy (2000). The orphans' initial impression of the 'pointless' (2000, p.4) physical exercises endured by the students is confirmed by their observation that the Prufrock Preparatory School's motto is 'Memento Mori,' or 'Remember you will die' (2000, p.13). Lemony Snicket, like J.K. Rowling and Eoin Colfer, sees nothing incongruous in the simultaneous experiences of education and death, oblivion or general meaninglessness. This paper examines nihilistic discourses elaborating pedagogy as explored in popular, contemporary children's narratives, analysing movements between pessimism and optimism or, in fact, what can be interpreted as cheerful nihilism

Australia’s Fairy Tales Illustrated in Print: Instances of Indigeneity, Colonization, and Suburbanization

Australian fairy tale could be following a new direction, evident in the recent work of Australian author and illustrator Shaun Tan. From a historical point of view, this article examines the disparity of early attempts to capture indigenous storytelling as fairy tale for white children and the invasion of the native landscape with English fairy creatures. It shows how this disparity has matured into a rediscovery of the underlying strangeness of the migratory infrastructures of Australian suburbs that are evident in such tales as those presented in Tan\u27s Tales from Outer Suburbia (2008)

Disney animated and theatrical musicals : interpreting the magic from The little mermaid to The little mermaid

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Comic Book Princesses for Grown-Ups: Cinderella Meets the Pages of the Superhero

Comic book superheroes and fairy tale princesses are stalwarts of contemporary children’s culture. Yet, they epitomise an intensifying gender segregation that is manifested and negotiated even up to the representation of female fairy tale protagonists in adult comics. This article examines the appearances of the iconic fairy tale princess, Cinderella, in twenty-first century adult comics including Bill Willingham’s <i>Fables</i> and Joe Tyler and Ralph Tedesco’s <i>Grimm Fairy Tales</i>. The tales of Perrault, the Grimms and Disney have shaped the contemporary iconography of Cinderella, emphasising the heroine’s journey from ashes and housework to tiaras and handsome princes. These popular tales, problematised by easy misogyny and patriarchal expectations, have overshadowed earlier versions of the Cinderella story, in which the heroine attacks her despised stepmother and beheads ogresses. Rediscovering the earlier, cunning and feisty incarnations of Cinderella, including Basile’s “The Cinderella Cat” and d’Aulnoy’s “Finette Cendron,” it can be seen how fairy tales’ interests in costume, masquerade and cunning have been readily absorbed into the comic book medium

Disney animated and theatrical musicals : interpreting the magic from The little mermaid to The little mermaid

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The state of play in Australian fairy tale: where to now?

At the turn of the last century, writers like Atha Westbury and Hume Cook were asking whether Australia had its own fairies, its own fairy tale lore. They attempted to fill the perceived lack of traditional fairy-tale narratives with their own published works of fairy tale. The titles authors chose for their collections – for instance, Olga Ernst’s Fairy tales from the land of the wattle and Annette Kellermann’s Fairy tales of the south seas and other stories – often revealed an overt wish to build a fairy-tale tradition that was distinctly and uniquely Australian. While some of these tales simply relocated existing European tales to the Australian context, most used classic fairy-tale tropes and themes to create new adventures. Other writers and collectors, like K Langloh-Parker, Sister Agnes and Andrew Lang, sought to present Indigenous tales as examples of local folk and fairy tales – a project of flawed good intentions grounded in colonial appropriation. These early Australian publications are largely forgotten and, in many ways, the erasure or forgetting of narratives that were often infused with colonial attitudes to gender, class, race, is far from regrettable. And yet there was a burgeoning local tradition of magical storytelling spearheaded by the delicate fairies of Ida Rentoul Outhwaite’s brush and the gumnut babies of May Gibbs that celebrated the Australian environment, its flora and fauna, populating and decorating new tales for the nation’s children