UC Riverside

Re-Structuring Fairy Tales in Four XX and XXI Century Mexican and Colombian Novels, offers a critical and analytical study of contemporary authors who present a revisionist writing of fairy tales. The first two chapters focus on how Colombian authors, Fanny Buitrago, and Albalucía Ángel incorporate fairy tales within their narrative, highlighting different aspects of this tradition following a feminist perspective. In Chapter One, I contend that Ángel incorporates Alice in Wonderland into her work to explore questions of female identity and social conditioning. In Chapter Two, I demonstrate how Fanny Buitragro's work draws on fairy tale structure to reinterpret women's experiences. I also explore how current Mexican writers Cristina Rivera Garza, and Jorge Volpi have turned to fairy tales to make sense out of the violent state of the country. In Chapter Three, I consider how Rivera Garza's work appropriates common fairy tale characters following her own concept of narrativas de desapropiación, which attempts to destroy authorship. In my final chapter, I study how Volpi utilizes the fairy tale by assigning new meaning to traditional European fairy tales in order to bring to light the violent reality and deaths in Mexico.