Little Red Riding Hood: From Orality to Carol Ann Duffy

This book deals with the oral fairytale “The Grandmother’s Story” and its later written versions. It covers two oral versions of the tale, two of its first written versions, and a recent poetic treatment of this tale by Poet Laureate Carol Ann Duffy. It starts with an introduction that sheds light on the nature of oral fairytales and the changes accompanying the change of the medium when these tales are subjected to the necessities and limitations of writing. The first chapter deals with two oral versions of the tale collected or documented by Terri Windling and Paul Delacrue. The second and third chapters tackle Charles Perrault and Brothers Grimm's versions and compares them to the oral ones to examine what has been lost in writing and because of patriarchal retellings. The fourth chapter sheds some light on feminists’ rewriting strategies of fairytales that aim at restoring what has been lost at the hands of patriarchal male writers. The fifth chapter focuses on Carol Ann Duffy’s “Little Red Cap” and shows how her rewriting of the tale holds a poetic, narrative, critical, discursive and aesthetic dialogue with previous treatments of the tale.