Workshop: The Anti-Fairytale with Helen Hagemann

Workshop: The Anti-Fairytale with Helen Hagemann @ the Fremantle Arts Centre, Friday, 25th August, 1pm-3pm.  Readings of Grimm's "The Fisherman and His Wife". Writing exercises will involve looking at the story in a modern context of turning it into "magic realism".
Venue: Fremantle Arts Centre, Upstairs Room, however enquire at desk. Time: 1-3pm. What to bring: Notepad, pen, laptop or iPad Cost: OOTA $25 - NON-OOTA $30 (ask for membership form to save). For information on joining OOTA and what we do, please visit our website ootawriters.com

    An anti-fairytale, also called anti-tale, is a fairytale which, unlike an ordinary one, has a tragic, rather than a happy ending, with the antagonists winning and the protagonists losing at the end of the story. Whereas fairy tales paint a magical, utopian world, anti-fairy tales paint a dark world of nastiness and cruelty. Such stories incorporate horror, black comedy, mean-spirited practical jokes on innocent characters, sudden and often cruel plot twists, and biting satire. Examples of anti-fairy tales include "The Fisherman and His Wife" and "The Swineherd". The term is also used to refer to remakes of traditional "happy" fairy tales into "unhappy" ones. The Shrek film series, which parodies and satirises fairytales, includes several elements of anti-fairy tales such as the deaths of heroic characters and scatalogical humour.
  

  "The Fisherman and His Wife" is a German fairytale collected by the Brothers Grimm. Its theme was used in The Tale of the Fisherman and the Fish, an 1833 poem by Aleksandr Pushkin. Virginia Woolf has her character Mrs. Ramsey in To the Lighthouse read a version of the story to her son, James. Günter Grass's 1977 novel, The Flounder, is loosely based on the fairy tale, as are Emanuele Luzzati's version, Punch and the Magic Fish, and Ursula LeGuin's novel The Lathe of Heaven.
It may be classified as an anti-fairy tale.
    Magical realism, magic realism, or marvelous realism is a genre of narrative fiction and, more broadly, art (literature, painting, film, theatre, etc.) that, while encompassing a range of subtly different concepts, expresses a primarily realistic view of the real world while also adding or revealing magical elements.
     Reference: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anti-fairy_tale

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