Paper short abstract:

Focusing on Michael Buckley's Sisters Grimm series, the Shrek movie franchise, Bill Willingham's comic book series Fables and ABC's Once Upon a Time, the paper proposes to examine the popular trend of combining characters from different fairy tales and placing them within the same fictional realm.

Paper long abstract:

In addition to re-envisioning well-known stories, the contemporary fascination with fairy tales also manifests itself as a surge of fairy-tale "mash-upsˮ, narratives (literary, cinematic or other) built around the premise that not only are fairy-tale characters "realˮ, but they all inhabit the same universe. Sometimes, this universe exists as separate from the "real worldˮ, as evidenced by movies from the popular Shrek franchise which are, in the traditional fairy-tale fashion, set in an unspecified "far, far awayˮ. At other times (and unbeknown to humans), the realistic and the marvellous exist side by side or even intertwine, which is particularly prominent in the Sisters Grimm novels by Michael Buckley, Bill Willingham's comic book series Fables and the ABC TV series Once Upon a Time, where each fairy-tale character is also given a "humanˮ identity.

By focusing on select examples from film (Shrek), (graphic) novels (Fables, Sisters Grimm) and TV series (Once Upon a Time), the paper proposes to examine how individual fairy-tale characters and stories are interpreted and transformed in these "mash-upsˮ and how the existence of a fairy-tale multiverse (especially one set in the "realˮ world) affects the our understanding of the genre as such. Special attention will be given to the changing notion of the fairy tale as a genre, as these supposedly fairy-tale realms often include characters from nursery rhymes, fables, legends, children's stories and other fantastic (and even realistic) genres.