How ‘the Old Stories Persist’: Folklore in Literature after Postmodernism

As twenty-first-century fiction constructs its identity, it must negotiate the inheritance of postmodernism. This article examines a particular strand of postmodernism’s legacy: that of the fairy tale reworkings which were so popular and so influential with writers considered postmodern. I will examine two related shifts apparent in twenty-first-century fiction: from the fairy tale to folklore, and from magic or the marvellous to the Todorovian fantastic. Rather than working with the fairy tales popularised by the Grimms and Disney, recent fictions are engaging with a broader range of folkloric narrative forms: I define the works which do this as folklore-inflected fictions. This change is formally linked to the shift into the fantastic, which I will explore through two recent novels: John Burnside’s A Summer of Drowning (2011) and Eowyn Ivey’s The Snow Child (2012). These novels create the fantastic differently, but both use a constellation of folklore, landscape, dreams, and hallucinations to maintain the Todorovian hesitation. Their use of the fantastic is part of the broader move towards a renegotiation of realism which has been emerging in recent fiction and criticism; this article shows how folklore-inflected fictions fit in to this larger trend.