| Fairy tales, despite their modern transformations into child-friendly stories, were once upon a time violent, filled with wolves devouring children, men murdering their disobedient wives, animal cruelty, and cannibalism. These original stories showcased wide examples of human jealousy, vanity, and greed; as Alice Hoffman said, "every fairy tale had a bloody lining. Every one had teeth and claws." My thesis transforms fourteen of these fairy tales, both classic and lesser-known, into stories which bring out their teeth and claws once again, sharpening them on an audience which has come to expect such stories to be sweet and innocent.;Many of the stories in this collection are flash fiction---stories less than one thousand words in length---though also included are several longer retellings. They display unexplored viewpoints, modernization, acts of courage sprouting from the will to live, and good overcoming evil, despite the cost. These stories attempt, in fourteen different ways, to reconnect readers with the fairy tales they thought they knew as children. |
