Littler Red Riding Hoods

In Revisioning Red Riding Hood around the World, Sandra Beckett presents 52 versions of the tale of Little Red Riding Hood in English translations from 15 other languages, representing authors, illustrators, and publishers from a globetrotter’s list of countries: Argentina, Belgium, Brazil, Canada, Chile, Colombia, Croatia, Cuba, Czech Republic, Ecuador, Egypt, France, Germany, Greece, Italy, Japan, Korea, Lebanon, Mexico, the Netherlands, Norway, Pakistan, Paraguay, Peru, Poland, Portugal, Qatar, Russia, Spain, and Switzerland. While some of the original texts first appeared in the early 20th century, most were published after 1970, and about half of them in the last two decades. While the book has been published by a university press, comments on the back cover of the paperback edition I read suggest it might be appropriate for an audience of students and other less specialized readers as well as for researchers in the field of fairy tales: in these comments, Cristina Bacchilega speaks of the book’s potential appeal to ‘‘a wide English-speaking readership’’ and Vanessa Joosen says, ‘‘What a treasure trove for researchers, what an eye-opener for students, and what a joy to read for all those interested in fairy tales, children’s literature, and world literature.’’ Unlike Bacchilega and Joosen, I am disappointed by this anthology*mostly because, based on their comments and the book’s title, I had such high expectations for it. I was looking forward to what the title identifies as ‘‘an anthology of international retellings’’ of the tale of Red Riding Hood from ‘‘around the world.’’ I wanted to learn how, as Sandra Beckett promises in her introduction, ‘‘the number and diversity of these retellings from the four corners of the globe demonstrate the tale’s remarkable versatility and its unique status in the collective unconscious and in literary culture, even beyond the confines of the Western world’’ (11). Unfortunately, though, both the world this anthology represents and the tales it retells are worrisomely incomplete. There is less here than there ideally ought to be. First, there is less of the world. The globe as depicted here is missing one of its four corners* the one where English is spoken. While Revisioning Red Riding Hood does make a lot of previously unavailable and often interesting material available to the English-speaking parts of the world, it also bypasses the existing English-language context in a way that significantly limits the audience Nordic Journal of ChildLit Aesthetics Vol. 5, 2014

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