New Fabulist Fiction: How the Fairy Tale Lives on in the 21st Century with “The In-Betweens and Further Fables”

Abstract

This creative thesis explores the definition and features of the New Fabulist genre and contains a manuscript of three stories that fit within the parameters of this genre. The critical foreword analyzes the emergence of New Fabulism, and the fictional stories locate Irish folklore within its parameters. New Fabulist literature is realist fiction that takes place in a world strongly resembling our own, with the exception of a magical element unexplained by our reality. It utilizes fairy tale archetypes and storylines in order to bring to light the realities of the human condition and to help the audience process those realities. Many New Fabulist authors utilize traditional fairy and folk tales as inspiration for their work. The magic presented in these tales forces the characters to confront their own frailties, to either rise to the occasion or fall to their own foibles. This is a newly defined genre, and as such, critical research on the topic is emerging. This thesis seeks to discover much of that research and add to critical conversation and artistic innovation of the genre. This thesis performs a close reading of three existing New Fabulist texts in order to discover and analyze their use of the genre, then uses that research to analyze figures in Irish folklore and utilizes those figures in order to create an original manuscript that is contextualized within this discussion.