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Snow White is one of the most popular fairy tales worldwide. Therefore, it is not surprising that the story has been reconsidered multiple times during the current trend of producing fairy tale adaptations. Especially the Evil Queen has become an object of further examination in many recent instalments of the story. In this chapter, I analyse the revision of Snow White's stepmother in the book series The Lunar Chronicles (2012–2016), the films Mirror Mirror (2012), Snow White and the Huntsman (2012) and The Huntsman: Winter's War (2016), as well as the TV-series Once Upon a Time (2011–2018). Compared to other villains in recent fairy tale adaptations, who are, like Maleficent, redeemed, the queen remains an embodiment of evil and terror in most adaptations. I outline the depiction of the Evil Queen in present-day US-American fairy tale narratives, assessing what makes her the most villainous woman in all the fairy tale realms and questioning why many of these stories try to understand but do not forgive her. The focus of this investigation is on the backstory that she is equipped with, her crimes, and her ultimate fate. Although she has been abused, traumatized, and betrayed, she seems to remain an uber villain, not only attempting to kill her stepdaughter but also destroying nature, starving her people, and spreading a deadly virus. This kind of representation might result from the fact that her opponent is by the very name the purest fairy tale princess ever known.

In recent years, there has been no shortage of research on the enormous pressure women face to have children. Similarly, the pressures put on mothers and the impossibility for women to live up to the ideal standards of motherhood are increasingly the subject of scrutiny. However, a shadowy figure lurks in the cultural imagination: the woman who refuses to have a child, or worse, hates the children she has. If narratives of maternal distress, anxiety and regret represent ‘the last taboo’, then narratives of willful rejection exist even outside of those boundaries.

This chapter explores narratives of women who are villainised for their negative relationships to motherhood and mothering, in canonical texts of the Western Anglosphere culture. Drawing examples from the Bible, from Charles Dickens, and from the Disney corporation, Çakmak and Rumson demonstrate the variations and ongoing poignancy of the narrative that women who reject or fail to have children are evil.

This paper aims to explore the “Fellowship-Tale” as an alternative tale type for narrating entrepreneur stories. The authors illustrate this by telling the Pilgrim business story. It is common for the deeds of men who founded businesses to be narrated as heroic entrepreneur stories. Such fairy tales are dominant narratives in Western culture but do not resonate with everyone, particularly women. Consequentially, many businesswomen do not engage in the rhetoric of enterprise.

The qualitative, analytic approaches adopted in this study include narratology, semiotics and aesthetics. This complementary triage helps us appreciate the complexity of entrepreneur stories while unravelling the nuances of the tale. It also permits triangulation of the data gathered from an in-depth interview of the respondent with newspaper and Internet research.

The research indicates that “fellowship-tales” provide a viable and credible alternative to the fairy-tale rendition common in entrepreneur and business stories.

An obvious limitation is that one merely swaps one narrative framework for another, albeit it offers dissenting voices a real choice.

This study has the potential to be far reaching because at a practical level, it allows disengaged entrepreneurs and significant others the freedom to exercise their individual and collective voices within a framework of nested stories.

A key contribution is to challenge the hegemony of a dominant and embedded social construct allowing new understandings to emerge via a novel combination of research methodologies.

This paper analyzes the phenomenon of popular management literature, proposing a reflection about its role in the managers’ subjectivity. Pop-management literature comprises books and magazines produced by the business media for fast consumption. Adopting the psychoanalytical approach to fairy tales as a perspective, we conducted a content analysis of two success stories published in the business media. We observed that the structure and key elements of fairy tales are present in these stories. We argue that the success stories help to reduce tensions and mitigate frustrations, supposedly offering answers for anxieties and professional problems. We also argue that continued access to these texts might keep individuals linked to their power fantasies and therefore might affect their development and maturing processes.

This paper aims to argue that culturally responsive approaches to literacy instruction are necessary not only to celebrate Black girl literacies but to also expose, challenge and disrupt antiblackness in English education. However, without explicit exemplars to guide classroom practice, this type of instruction will remain elusive. The present paper expands upon the original conceptualization of Counter Fairy Tales (CFT) by further explicating the framework and providing recommendations to inform culturally responsive literacy practices to disrupt antiblackness.

The question that drives this study asks how can the CFT model be applied as a form of culturally responsive literacy instruction to best teach Black girls?

The CFT framework places value on Black girls’ ways of knowing and gives primacy to their voice and unique experiences through culturally responsive literacy instruction.

The larger implication of this research is for teachers to begin to create culturally responsive literacy instruction that honors the lived experiences of today’s Black adolescent girls, particularly those in young grades. Inclusive and affirming literary practices must be established, an environment in which Black girls can share their voices and visions as they explore themselves through writing.

This conceptual paper is one of few that specifically focuses on how teachers can use CFTs to facilitate the inclusion of Black girls’ experiential and communal ways of knowing to support culturally responsive literacy instruction in younger grades.

A reciprocal relationship between fairy tales and psychoanalytic theories is at the heart of this chapter and the focus is on the mother's point of view in the well-known tale type ‘Snow White’ (ATU709), from an interdisciplinary viewpoint. ¹ This tale type deals with the mother–daughter relationship, on the change the mother goes through as her daughter reaches adolescence.

I have chosen to focus on versions deriving from a Muslim-Arab source, most of them archived in the Israel Folktale Archives (IFA). My assumption was that versions of this tale type could provide fertile ground for a deep look into motherhood and its representation in the psyche, and the subjective experience of mothers in face of their daughters' puberty in particular.

I have found that through creative means, this story depicts feminine experiences that psychoanalytic theory has not yet conceptualised. I divided the process undergone by mothers into three phases: (1) A defining moment (2) A fantasy of reversal (3) A new horizon for feminine development in adulthood.

In midlife, women experience physical, mental and social changes that can feel devastating at first and may lead to destructive reactions. However, the process described in this chapter exemplifies how women in general and mothers in particular can develop as they age from denial of reality and sorrow about the loss of their beauty, youth and fertility, to acceptance of the change and a realisation that there is room for further development as a woman and as a mother.

The pretty girl with raven hair sings as she works and dreams of wonderful days ahead. The girl's dream is deferred by the wickedly jealous stepmother who sends a trusted guard to commit murder. The man, overwhelmed by the girl's inherent goodness is unable to complete his deed, and warns her to run away and never return. She travels deep into the woods and is helped by friendly forest creatures with big eyes. They take her to a small cottage and she falls asleep, to be awakened by several small men who find it in their hearts to allow her to remain. The miniature men leave for work the next day, warning the girl of the stepmother and her trickery. The nasty woman disguises herself and easily convinces the girl to take a bite of the religiously symbolic apple, after which the girl is induced into a coma. The small men return, chase after the horrible stepmother and cause her to fall to her death, after which they do not bury the beauty-girl, but instead leave her ensconced in a glass tomb for all to see. The gallant prince finally arrives and kisses her, true love breaking the apple's spell and allowing the girl to ride away on the horse with the true hero, leaving behind the woodland creatures and small men forever. Sunlight beaming, girl beaming, small men and creatures beaming. All is right with the world.

The Evil Queen is a staple character in many fairy tales, but perhaps one of her most famous incarnations is as Snow White's evil stepmother. In order to gain a better understanding of the dynamics of gender and morality in this story, this chapter analyses three different versions of the fairy tale Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs: the Brothers Grimm's nineteenth-century text, Disney's 1930s film adaptation, and The Snow Queen's Shadow, a contemporary novel based loosely on a mix of well-known European fairy tales. The chapter explores what, exactly, marks the Queen as evil in the different versions, how her morality interacts with questions of gender and cultural context, and how the different versions portray the relationship – and often the moral dichotomy – between the Evil Queen and Snow White.

The management of children′s literature is a search for value and suitability. Effective policies in library and educational work are based firmly on knowledge of materials, and on the bibliographical and critical frame within which the materials appear and might best be selected. Boundaries, like those between quality and popular books, and between children′s and adult materials, present important challenges for selection, and implicit in this process are professional acumen and judgement. Yet also there are attitudes and systems of values, which can powerfully influence selection on grounds of morality and good taste. To guard against undue subjectivity, the knowledge frame should acknowledge the relevance of social and experiential context for all reading materials, how readers think as well as how they read, and what explicit and implicit agendas the authors have. The good professional takes all these factors on board.