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Red Riding Hood and the Wolf in Bed: Modernism's Fairy Tales.

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Red Riding Hood and the Wolf in Bed: Modernism's Fairy Tales. By Ann Martin.

Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2007. 199 pp., bibliography, index.

Modernism's Fairy Tales, the subtitle of Ann Martin's book, raises expectations of critique. Many of the artists and writers commonly associated with European modernism were attracted to what we could call fairy-tale thinking--in particular, faith in a happily ever after. On the one hand there's the polemical new beginnings of the likes of futurism and imagism, the credos of which posit a slate wiped clean of the accumulated works of recent history; on the other, the projected ever afters of the more radically conservative modernists, for whom the recently literate and urbanized masses needed herding--or worse--in the interests of a new order of the elite. That these very masses might be reading fairy tales, and so perpetuating the threat of a tide of popular culture, is only one of the many ironies of modernism's dangerously utopian tendencies.

Red Riding Hood and the Wolf in Bed doesn't quite follow this line, but it's an indication of the richness of the conjunction of modernism and fairy tale that it should give rise to a host of interpretative possibilities. The conjunction itself is wonderfully unexpected, leading this reader to imagine a series of similarly counterintuitive meetings: Romanticism and the Circus? The Nouveau Roman and the Folktale? Myth is...

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