Send message to Author

Paper short abstract

This paper will contextualize and critique the extensive historical global application of the folktale wolf, highlighting characterizations which often defy our traditional assumptions about the creature’s inflexible sexuality, physique, social stature, and immoral/amoral character.

Paper long abstract

Vladimir Nabokov famously asserted that “literature was born on the day when a boy came crying ‘wolf, wolf’ and there was no wolf behind him.” From such origins, the wolf has often been characterized as an archetype of moral transgression and masculine antagonism ranging from the sixteenth-century Chinese tale 中山狼傳 [The Wolf of Zhongshan] to the classic Northern Italian legend Zio Lupo [Uncle Wolf] to Sergei Prokofiev’s Soviet-era Петя и Bолк [Peter and the Wolf]. While a bevy of academic assessments of the folktale wolf focus on two of the most contemporarily adapted narratives - Little Red Riding Hood and The Three Little Pigs - these tales (and their alternative retellings) offer a comparatively limited view of the rich history of the wolf within stories of fantasy and reinforce a set of negative stereotypes which foment a series of harmful species biases (Lappalainen) and ignore the figure’s potentially complicated motives for transgression. From Angela Carter’s revisionist Wolf Trilogy to Tomoko Konoike’s amorphic multimedia expressions of mythological wolves, there have been a series of contemporary interventions against such reductive characterizations of the wolf, but these should be seen as part of a historical continuum within the folktale rather than a recent development. While considering the evolving place of the most familiar wolf tales in a postmodern and post-masculine context, this paper also will highlight the extensive global applications of the folktale wolf throughout history, which often defy our traditional assumptions about the creature’s inflexible sexuality, physique, social stature, and immoral/amoral character.