Literary Recycling of Traditional Tales. The Path towards the Postdigital Traditional Tale

Abstract

This contribution seeks to analyse, from a theoretical standpoint, the ways traditional tales are recycled as an important part of children’s and young adult’s literature. This article is based on the idea that traditional tales have their origins in such defining features as orality, universality and cohesive capacity, features that enhance their propensity for re- elaboration, re- appropriation and re- use processes. Furthermore, intertextuality and recycling will be considered as narrative strategies that belong to children’s literature in the way conceived by Gianni Rodari in his Grammatica della fantasia ([1973] 2018) [The Grammar of Fantasy], ideological and politically correct strategies like those of James Finn Garner (1994) and acculturation strategies such as the ones that have become highly recurrent in recent years and that adapt traditional tales to today’s technological and postdigital world, as in the novels starring princesses by Nina MacKay (2016).