Just Wonder: Shifting Perspectives in Tradition

Inspired by folklore, television, fairy tales, social media, novels, and films, Just Wonder addresses crucial themes in social and ecological justice efforts. Moving into the mid-twenty-first century, wonder--as a potentially critical sociocultural, ecological, and individual stance--will play a significant role in reconceptualizing the present to imagine a different and better world.

These essays examine fairy tales and other traditional forms of the fantastic and the real to offer alternative expressions of justice relevant to gender, sex, sexuality, environment, Indigeneity, class, ability, race, decolonizing, and human and nonhuman relations. By analyzing fairy tales and wonder texts from various media through an intersectional feminist lens, Pauline Greenhill and Jennifer Orme consider how wonder genres and forms blend with diverse conceptions of seeking and enacting justice. International collaborators--both established and emerging scholars who self-identify with different subjectivities, locations, and generations and come from an impressive range of inter/disciplines--engage with contemporary and historical texts from various languages and cultural contexts, including interventions, counterparts, and comparisons to the fairy tale. Just Wonder offers a critical look at how creative wondering can expand the ability to resist modes of oppression while fostering equity, as well as encourage curiosity and imagination.

In a world that can be overwhelming and precarious, this book presents scholarly, artistic, personal, and collective-action interventions to identify and respond to injustice while centering wonder and, thus, imagination, questioning, and hope. Just Wonder will appeal to fairy-tale scholars; folklorists; students and scholars of film, media studies, and cultural studies; as well as a general audience.

Pauline Greenhill is professor of women’s and gender studies at the University of Winnipeg in Manitoba, Canada. She is the author or coeditor of numerous books including Fairy Tale TV, Make the Night Hideous, Unsettling Assumptions, The Routledge Companion to Media and Fairy-Tale Culture, and Clever Maids, Fearless Jacks, and a Cat. Her work has appeared in Signs, Marvels & Tales, Studies in European Cinema, Resources for Feminist Research, Folklore, NECSUS, Canadian Journal of Women and the Law, and parallax, among others.

Jennifer Orme is an independent scholar, editor, and writer in Toronto, Canada. She coedited the creative anthology Inviting Interruptions: Wonder Tales in the Twenty-First Century and has published on fairy tales in academic journals and books. Additionally, she has written magazine feature articles, multisensory ghost and adventure tales, and creative nonfiction.