Hoppa till sidinnehåll
ForskningForskning- och utvecklingsartiklarVetenskaplig tidskrift”If you thought this story sour, sweeten it with your own telling”
Vetenskaplig tidskrift

”If you thought this story sour, sweeten it with your own telling”

Publicerad:2010-03-29
Uppdaterad:2023-09-03
Ebba Reinolf
Skribent:Ebba Reinolf
The attempts to challenge conventional gendered discourses in children’s fantasy have often resulted in feminist rewritings of earlier stories. Ghost dance (1994) by the English author Susan Price is a novel that reflects a specific feminist poetics of rewriting: metafictional passages highlight the constructedness of the narrative and at the end readers are invited to tell their own versions of the story. Moreover, the rewriting freely combines and recontextualises elements from different source texts and reformulates them to create a narrative that challenges conventional discourses of gender. While this poetics has an appeal from a feminist perspective, the play with cross-cultural intertexts and gender becomes more complex when the novel is examined in a postcolonialist framework in relation to ethnicity and the issue of cultural appropriation. Ghost dance is situated in a setting that has a real-world equivalent (Russia), involves characters that are identified with names of real-world ethnic groups (Lapps (Sámi), Russian), and mixes elements from Russian wonder tales, Nordic mythology and an Ojibwe legend. The novel does not aim at historical accuracy in its representations nor is it a direct retelling of any of the pre-texts but combines motifs, themes, names, characters and settings freely from each source. In this textual melting pot, the protagonist Shingebiss is, on one level, a revision of the witch Baba Yaga, but also described as a Lappish shaman with an Ojibwe name. To rewrite gendered discourses, certain elements from the pretexts are chosen and others left out – the question is, then, what effects does this recontextualisation have on the representation of ethnicity? Or, are the feminist rewriting strategies actually a form of cultural appropriation? Författare: Sanna Lehtonen If you thought this story sour, sweeten it with your own telling” – a feminist poetics of rewriting in Susan Price’s Ghost danceBarnboken – tidskrift för barnlitteraturforskning 1/2010
Vetenskaplig tidskrift
Forskningsbevakningen presenteras i samarbete med

forskningsinstitutet Ifous

Läs mer
Stockholm

Skolnärvaro

Skolportens fortbildning för dig som på olika sätt arbetar med elevers närvaro i skolan! Delta på plats i Stockholm den 27 mars eller via webbkonferensen 2–30 april. Boka din plats till bästa pris idag!
Läs mer och boka
Åk F–Gy
27 mar 2026
Digital temaföreläsning

Hantera kontroversiella frågor i samhällsämnen

Välkommen till Skolportens digitala temaföreläsning om hur du kan bemöta kontroversiella åsikter och hantera känsliga frågor i samhällsämnena, från åk 7 till vux. Är ni en grupp som vill delta? Kontakta Skolporten för specialerbjudande!
Läs mer och boka
Åk 7–Vux
13 apr – 18 maj 2026