Snow White of the (Un)Dead Reading the Anita Blake: Vampire Hunter Series as Tales of Female Desire

Author
Publication year
2020
Pages
141-159
Comment

The introduction to the volume states that "Karin Heiß [...] engages with the re-writing of ‘Snow White’ and ‘Beauty and the Beast’ in Laurell K. Hamilton’s Anita Blake: Vampire Hunter series (1993–2018)" (14).

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The inclusion of (fairy) tale structures and motifs, especially “Snow White” and “Beauty and the Beast”, [...] adds an additional narrative layer to the genres of paranormal romance and urban fantasy. The texts’ nuanced modifications to the well-known tales establish narrative suspense and generate readerly desire for knowledge. These changes and their functions will be investigated in this chapter. (142)

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the romance plot is dispersed and thus deferred over the whole series – yet it is here that the most interesting representations regarding popular tales occur. The respective desires in form of struggles for sexual or physical power are negotiated through tale structures and elements. In turn, their negotiation shapes and re-informs the tale as part of a cultural trajectory addressing the connection between sexuality and violence as part of female (reading/readers’) desires. (143)