From Folklore to Fantasy: How Spinning Silver and The Bear and the Nightingale move beyond retellings
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2025-06-15
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en
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Fairy tales have long influenced fantasy literature, providing a foundation for storytelling that blends the mystical with the moral. This thesis examines how two English-language fantasy novels, Naomi Novik’s Spinning Silver (2019) and Katherine Arden’s The Bear and the Nightingale (2017), draw upon fairy tale structures and Slavic folklore to create fantasy narratives. By analysing these fantasy novels through a close reading, this research uncovers how contemporary fantasy literature reinterprets folkloric storytelling elements, such as narrative functions, motifs, and characters. It argues that both authors move beyond retellings, using fairy tale logic and folklore to construct immersive, morally complex worlds that reflect and reinterpret folklore for a contemporary audience.
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