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Paper short abstract

A reflection on the multiple natures of wonder based on folklore and fairy-tale discussions of how human/non-human entanglements in fairy tales overlap and differ from those in other wonder genres across cultures and media.

Paper long abstract

Human/non-human conversations, romances, transformations, hybrids, conflicts, and kinships are core elements of fairy-tale wonder. Investigating human/non-human interactions in fairy tales, Lewis Seifert focuses on metamorphosis and hybridity, Daniela Kato points to the relationships of plants and women, and Mayako Murai calls for reclassifying tales based on their multispecies relationality. How do these fairy-tale human/non-human entanglements compare to those in other wonder genres across cultures and media? This question invites a consideration of wonder in the plural, whereby we acknowledge how some wondrous storyworlds are made possible by the affordances of multimodal media, how wonder genres across the planet challenge the western fictional/nonfictional divide, and how Indigenous wonderworks reassert histories and lived realities that colonialism had dismissed as fictional or primitive. Whereas fairy tales participate in the otherwise logic of other wonder genres—from zhiguai (strange/wonder/ghost story) in Chinese traditions to khurāfa (fictional fantastic tales) in The Thousand and One Nights and moʻolelo kamahaʻo in Hawaiʻi—their sense of wonder is not one and the same in part because their perceptions of natural/supernatural/preternatural relations differ. Pauline Greenhill and I have discussed wonder media where a human/nonhuman hybrid is the central character and where a First Nations youth’s communication with birds and drones has decolonial effects. kuʻualoha hoʻomanawanui discusses how moʻolelo ʻāhiwahiwa affirm “multispecies kinship and care” and make humans accountable to animals, land, and elements in Oceania; and Margaret Lyngdoh’s fieldwork teaches us about human/non-human animal transformations in Northeast Indian Khasi traditional tales within an understanding of water as knowledge resource.