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Bugio Bonito Batista Cheira, Alexandra Isabel
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- Re-engendering “Cinderella” on screen: Andy Tennant’s Ever After: A Cinderella StoryPublication . Cheira, Alexandra Isabel Bugio Bonito Batista, 1972-The enchanted realm of the wonder tale has been gazed upon quite often by novelists, short-story authors and even poets, who have imaginatively translated into their creations their own personal wanderings in wonderland. I will thus read four very different wonder tale versions of “Cinderella”, on a par with Andy Tennant’s Ever After: A Cinderella Story (1998). I will focus on the gendered differences between wonder tale versions and film, as well as on their distinctive narrative techniques. I argue that this feminist revision of “Cinderella” re-engenders identities by being closer to the only version written by a woman author, both in narrative style and in substance, than to any of the male versions — including the alleged Grimm tale it follows.
- “A miscegenated metamorphosis under glass”: O vidro como metáfora do equilíbrio entre princípios opostos nos contos “The Glass Coffin” e “Cold” de A. S. ByattPublication . Cheira, Alexandra Isabel Bugio Bonito Batista, 1972-Este ensaio analisa dois contos de encantar de A. S. Byatt, “The Glass Coffin” e “Cold”, a partir de um motivo narrativo encontrado em muitos contos deste subgénero literário: o vidro. Antes da análise deste motivo nos dois contos em apreço, será feita uma breve contextualização histórica de dois tipos de narradoras presentes na tradição literária do conto de encantar, de modo a situar A. S. Byatt nesta tradição e a examinar o modo como incorpora algumas das suas lições nestes contos. A discussão da simbologia do vidro nos textos em análise será feita em articulação com o estudo Victorian Glassworlds: Glass Culture and the Imagination 1830–1880, de Isobel Armstrong, que examina o vidro enquanto material antitético em vários contos de encantar.
- Cultural memory in contemporary fiction: F. R. Leavis’s and Matthew Arnold’s intellectual presence in A. S. Byatt’s workPublication . Cheira, Alexandra Isabel Bugio Bonito Batista, 1972-The concept of “cultural memory” serves as the foundation for this article, which explains the complex relationships between two prominent figures in the history of English letters, Matthew Arnold and F. R. Leavis, as well as how A. S. Byatt’s own work was influenced by their combined, though occasionally diametrically opposed, approaches to literature, culture, and criticism. As a result, this article begins with a discussion of the conflictual continuity and/or sustained ambivalence in Byatt’s critique of Leavisite criticism. It does this by first looking into Leavis’s position within the larger literary criticism context and then focusing on how Leavisite criticism fits into Byatt’s critical thought. Thus, Byatt’s assertion that Leavis made English literature the focal point of university education is examined by first looking into Leavis’s Cambridge. Lastly, Byatt’s criticism of Leavis’s idea of English studies is looked into in the context of critical evaluations of English literature’s place in higher education, at the same time that Byatt’s work is used as a prism to analyse the Arnoldian matrix of the Leavisite concept of “moral seriousness”. Afterward, Byatt’s critical work is critically examined in the framework of culture, society, and literature, continuing Arnold’s legacy.
- Snowy fusion: Andersen's Snow Queen and the Grimm's Snow White blend in A.S. Byatt's FiammarosaPublication . Cheira, Alexandra Isabel Bugio Bonito Batista, 1972-“Cold”, the wonder tale which, in Elementals, fully justifies the secondary title Stories of Fire and Ice, is a sophisticated seduction game which brings the reader close to the text by means of both a microscopic and a telescopic lens, as this story draws on two female universes that the colour white will (dis)unite: goodness and evil. I further emphasise this dichotomy by arguing that Byatt’s tale assimilates opposites in the symbolic meanings of white as a privileged signature of feminine identity. In order to better analyse the way Byatt resumes traditional wonder tales’ colour white only to subvert and write it anew in her fiction, I will read “Cold” on a par with Hans Christien Andersen’s “Snow Queen” and the Brothers Grimm’s “Snow White”. I will evince the link between this colour and the motif of ice and snow, which is apparent in the titles of these traditional tales and hinted at in the title of Byatt’s tale, as another double-meaning symbol for female identity in the three tales. I will finally look closely at the way Byatt thoroughly explodes the dichotomy which pushes women into the corset of polar figurations of asexual angels and demonic temptresses in her female protagonist, Fiammarosa, by blending the eponymous wonder tales’ evil and good female characters through the colour white.
- A fairy godmother of her own in 17thCentury France: subversive female agency in Madame d’Aulnoy’s “The White Cat”Publication . Cheira, Alexandra Isabel Bugio Bonito Batista, 1972-Magic and metamorphosis always go hand in hand in wonder tales. I argue that in Marie Cathérine d’Aulnoy’s wonder tales, however, it would be more accurate to say that magic and metamorphosis go paw in hand: I will analyse d’ Aulnoy’s wonder tale “The White Cat” in order to illustrate the way she favours the mythological theme of animal metamorphosis. Herself the victim of an unhappy arranged marriage in seventeenth-century France, Madame d’Aulnoy was highly critical of forced marriages, so much so that her tales seriously commented on love, courtship and marriage. D’Aulnoy’s buoyant tales tell their author’s search for magic in her own life, marked by scandal and rebellion against the marriage mores of her time from a very early age on. She is Fairy Godmother to her heroines, granting them happiness after sore trials and tribulations, and to herself, by refusing to be a passive object submitted to another’s will and reclaiming instead the agency of changing her life.