little red riding hood original story charles perrault

A leading British publishing house that collaborated with renowned writers and artists, Victor Gollancz Ltd played a key role in changing perceptions of the fairy tale in the late 1970s and 1980s by enhancing its status as literature.

These collaborations shed light on the transcreative dynamics at the heart of the genre as involving authors, translators, illustrators and editors alike 3. This translation, first published as The Fairy Tales of Charles Perrault (1977) with artwork by Martin Ware, gave rise to different editorial projects under the aegis of the progressive publisher Victor Gollancz (then headed by his daughter Livia), owing to the young and adventurous editor Liz Calder recommending Carter’s The Passion of New Eve (1977) 2. The present essay exemplifies this phenomenon through the editorial history of Angela Carter’s translation of Charles Perrault’s Histoires ou contes du temps passé (1697) and its remarkably productive reception.

5 Many contemporary writers have paid tribute to Carter, including Emma Donoghue, China Miéville, Sal (.)ġ As they are passed on from one generation to the next, fairy tales owe their “ eternal youth ” to various forms of translation, transposition and transmediation in the endless play of repetition, reinterpretation, and transformation across languages, art forms, and media.

3 For a tentative definition of transcreation as combining different modalities of translation to sti (.).

Gordon has documented the friendship between Carter and Calder in The Invention of Angela Carter (.) The translation was reissued with child-friendly illustrations by Michael Foreman in Sleeping Beauty and Other Favourite Fairy Tales (1982), also published by Victor Gollancz, which later fed into Classic Fairy Tales Retold and Illustrated by Michael Foreman (2005) 1.

As a case study, I trace the editorial history of Angela Carter’s translation of The Fairy Tales of Charles Perrault (1977) illustrated by Martin Ware, which paved the way for Carter’s own collection of ‘ stories about fairy stories ’, The Bloody Chamber and Other Stories (1979), in contrapuntal fashion. It notably draws attention to the role of translators, illustrators and publishers whose collaborations have produced new versions of the familiar stories in print form, which have in turn inspired highly innovative projects for children and adults reflecting personal takes on the stories. The article proposes that the fairy-tale tradition unfolds as a collective, dynamic and transformative process of transcreation across languages, contexts and media for different purposes and publics.

Little red riding hood original story charles perrault