Master of Arts / Department of English / Kimball Smith / This thesis stands as the first part of the earliest novel in a series that will appeal to the mass public, utilizing well-celebrated fairy tale elements and introducing old elements of courtly romance from the medieval literature period. In doing so, I have worked to create a fantastical world with obvious parallels to historical and present notions of society, culture, and human interactions, but with a new and interesting twist on concepts readers are familiar with. The universe I’ve created is able to be introduced in this first installment and gradually broadened as the series progresses to prevent exhaustive detail which may distract the reader. Also, it is restricted by specific laws in terms of magical abilities and power in order to give the reader boundaries to react within and prevent the unhelpful limitlessness that causes a loss of interest. The main character, Emily Fenhorn, is a thirteen-year-old girl who is fairly average in her adolescence. She’s neither the weakest nor the strongest character, leaving room for both growth and human frailty. The conflicts that affect Emily in this first installment center primarily on problems that teenagers deal with on a regular basis such as the need for acceptance, making new friends, making and dealing with enemies, popularity, and academic concerns. Unlike other thirteen-year-olds, Emily is plagued by a horrifying ‘gift’ that she doesn’t know how to control; a gift which ends up earning her place at Grimm’s Reformatory.

This interdisciplinary, archetypal study considers the numerous adaptation processes and techniques involved in the transposition of the fairy tale from one medium to another, exploring post-2000 adult adaptations and appropriations of ‘Little Red Riding Hood’ across a variety of high-art and popular media, such as advertising, video gaming, and fine art, with a focus on literature and film. As well as examining explicit re-tellings of the tale such as Catherine Hardwicke’s 'Red Riding Hood' (2011), more implicit and intertextual references are discussed, with the intention of acknowledging the pervasive, and at times, unconscious nature of the adaptation process. This can be seen in films like 'The Village' (2004), 'Hard Candy' (2005) and the television series 'Merlin' (2008 - ). As a means of analysing the material I adopt a feminist-Jungian theoretical model which enables the consideration of the mythological and ideological concepts inherent to the works. Specifically, this establishes how Red Riding Hood can be understood as a shifting archetype when compared to her fairy tale sisters such as Snow White, Cinderella, Sleeping Beauty et al, thus allowing for so many diverse portrayals of her character: as the child, the innocent victim, the femme-fatale, and the monstrous feminine. The rationale behind the thesis is threefold; firstly, ‘Little Red Riding Hood’ is typically understood as a cautionary tale, rather than a female quest narrative, therefore, I will explore how the tale is often used as a vehicle for post/feminist issues and/or gender anxieties, providing a commentary on the construction and perception of girls’ and women’s roles in contemporary Western society. Secondly, the work creates a space for the acknowledgement and discussion of unconscious appropriation which has so far remained on the margins of adaptation studies. And thirdly, to establish fairy tales, using ‘Little Red Riding Hood’ as an example, as the ultimate intertext(s), demonstrating how characters, themes and plots are continually (re)appropriated.

5 Abstract This thesis deals with fairy tale and its meaning and using in a modern family. The theoretical part focuses on definition of terms fairy tale and family and points on their characteristic signs and functions, briefly mentions development of fairy tale and family throughout history, points at fairy tale in a context of children's thinking and feeling and offers a psychological characteristics of four selected fairy tales. The empirical part applies both quantitative and qualitative methods of processing the data, which were obtained from a questionnaire that was answered by 135 people. Its purpose is to find out the most frequent form of contact of a child with fairy tales, to learn which person reads or tells fairy tales to a child the most often and to show which versions of fairy tales are most common among children. This thesis also analyses opinions of parents on meaning of fairy tales in a life of a child and family and defines the reasons which parents have for reading or nonreading of fairy tales. Using statistics methods, there were shown some significant differences between audiovisual and read/told form of a contact of children with fairy tales, differences were also shown between the groups of mothers and fathers in a frequencies of reading fairy tales to their children and it was...