This dissertation investigates the phenomenon of the reworking of children's narrative, generally termed "fairy tales," within the framework of Spanish post-Civil War fiction. It is focused on selected novels by four contemporary women writers whose works are representative of the phenomenon under study. They are: Carmen Laforet (Nada 1944), Ana Maria Matute (Primera memoria 1959), Esther Tusquets ( El mismo mar de todos los veranos 1979) and Carmen Martin Gaite (Caperucita en Manhattan 1990 and La reina de las nieves 1994). / The first three chapters examine generic issues as a preliminary step towards the explanation of the significance of fairy tales to novelists today. To this end, the first chapter tackles the ambiguities surrounding current definitions of the fairy-tale genre to establish dearly the nature of the narrative substructure of the novels of the study. It proposes an alternative approach which lends a chronological dimension to present definitions that are based on stylistic and structural analysis alone. This is followed by a second chapter which explains the recurrence of fairy tales and fairy-tale motifs in the novels by underlining the structural and conceptual similarities between the two genres. The third chapter is devoted to a comparative analysis of the genres under study as a means of isolating minimal recurrent units of the children's narratives and explaining their transformation in the novels. / The last three chapters, based primarily on the findings of the comparative analysis of the fairy tales and their novelistic versions, focus on two important fairy-tale motifs that appear to hold the key to the importance of fairy tales in the novels: The marginalization of the fairy-tale hero and the ambiguous image of the mother-figure as at once evil and benevolent. The fourth chapter therefore concentrates on the various conventions of marginality in the novels and the fifth is dedicated to a study of the structure of the contemporary novel against the backdrop of its transformation of the basic fairy-tale paradigm that traces the development of the hero from a marginalized position to his/her integration into society. The sixth chapter concludes the question of transformations by analyzing the image of the woman in the contemporary novel on the basis of the reworking of the evil stepmother/fairy godmother motif.

No description available.