Book Proposal for The Fairy Tale as Secular Scripture

The Fairy Tale as Secular Scripture begins from the premise that fairy tales are a battleground in twenty-first century American culture. Hundreds of fairy tales enter the cultural space each year and are met with both acclaim and censure. Fairy tales are censured even as we consume them, but these cultural moments have been underexamined in scholarly literature to date. But not only doe we consume fictional fairy-tale texts, we use fairy tales to communicate about the world we live in. This monograph seeks to understand the proliferation of fairy tales—in children’s picture books, in young adult fantasy novels, in popular literature, and on screens large and small—as well as the proliferation of harsh fairy tale critiques—in parenting advice publications, in religious magazines, and in feminist scholarship. Arguments about the value of fairy tales in contemporary American society intersect with arguments about how to raise children to be good adults, about the place of faith in society, about the false dichotomy between faith and science, about evangelical Christians’ persecution complex. This monograph doesn’t offer prescriptive answers to these questions, but it does reframe the conversation to include the intersections among them