How to Read Literature Like a Professor: Chapter 7 Summary & Analysis

As previous chapters have shown, authors frequently borrow from the existing literary canon in their own work. The canon refers to an elusive and ever-changing list of literary texts that critics feel are essential to understanding the history of English literature as a whole. In the USA, the canon is not an official list, but rather a notionally agreed-upon group of books that is constantly being amended, updated, and fought over. The canon changes as society changes; whereas in previous times, it was exclusively dominated by white male authors from Europe and North America, nowadays it features more female writers, writers of color, and writers from the Global South.

Although it has historically been common for authors to “borrow” from the canon, nowadays many indisputably canonical texts will not be familiar to the average reader (most Americans, for example, have not read Homer’s Iliad). If an author references a text like the Iliad, many readers will fail to notice, and may even feel alienated and frustrated by encountering references that they cannot understand. As a solution to this problem, many authors have chosen to borrow from children’s literature—everything from folktales to The Wind in the Willows (1908) to The Cat in the Hat (1957).

According to Foster, the fairy tale with the most enduring appeal is “Hansel and Gretel.” This story centers around the classic theme of lost children who cannot find their way home, and—although it comes in many forms—tends to play on cultural anxieties around this issue. For example, in Robert Coover’s “The Gingerbread House” (1969), the witch kills the doves who eat the breadcrumbs (as opposed to killing the children themselves) and is identified only by a flash of black rag at the end of the story. Coover is aware of the fame of “Hansel and Gretel” and thus only needs to hint at the fate of the children in order to induce a shudder in the reader.

Some writers deliberately subvert well-known fairy tales; this is the case with Angela Carter who, in The Bloody Chamber (1979), revises stories such as “Bluebeard” and “Puss-in-Boots” in order to cast them in a more feminist light. Both Carver and Coover demonstrate that authors do not need to lift everything from a fairy tale, but can pick and choose certain elements. These elements could be as subtle as “the sense of lostness” or the danger of temptation. Like Shakespeare and the Bible, fairy tales are all part of “one big story” and so are inherently connected to later works of literature.

This might sound ironic, Foster admits—and that’s the point. Fairy tales represent an oversimplified, morally straightforward version of the world, and thus their adaptation in the modern era is almost always laced with irony. At the same time, certain fairy tale archetypes seem perfectly suited to the modern world, such as children who’ve wandered far from home. In both cases, borrowing from fairy tales allows authors to create a mix of strangeness and familiarity within their work, and it is this mix that creates the depth and vibrancy of good literature.