This web page is dedicated to “Transformations,” a course taught in Graduate Liberal Studies at Simon Fraser University by professor June Sturrock, and described below. The links to “Faerie Stories” and “Essays” are selections from the works of fancy and academia produced by students.
The “transformations” of the title are twofold. In fairy stories and related narratives, pumpkins turn into golden coaches, misers become generous and loving, music tames wild animals, and magic cloaks ensure invisibility. We’ll look at such transformations and consider what needs are satisfied by such narratives. But there are other transformations that we will need to examine in thinking about fairy stories, and these transformations are involved in transmission, from one teller to another, from oral culture to print, from print to film, ballet, or opera. Therefore we address not only the cultural and historical contexts of fantasy literature but also related work in opera, ballet, film, and the visual arts.
The other key word in the title is “freedom.” In this course we will think about the ways in which both their proclaimed readership (children) and their mode (the fantastic) liberated many nineteenth century writers in their treatments of relations between adults, between adults and children, and between the social and natural worlds. They were enabled in such texts to represent and to play with transgressions of gender conventions and of sexual and social norms—conventions and norms that were perhaps especially strong at a time and in a place dominated by the demands of the industrial revolution and of an expanding empire. We will examine how, to quote the critic Juliet Dusinberre, “cultural change was both reflected and pioneered in the books which children read” in the nineteenth century.
Although our focus is on the nineteenth century, we begin with the late eighteenth century with Mozart’s joyous Magic Flute. We end on a darker note by discussing the different freedoms claimed through the fantasies of three late twentieth century writers, Anne Sexton, Angela Carter and A. S. Byatt . In between we consider important texts from England, Scotland, Ireland, Germany, Denmark, and France.
