Feminist Rewriting of Folktales: Éilís Ní Dhuibhne and Carmen Blanco

Abstract

The aim of this essay is to explore the feminist rewriting of traditional folktales through the comparison of Irish and Galician literature. This will be done by analyzing two contemporary authors: Carmen Blanco and Éllís Ní Dhuibhne; the books that are being considered for this dissertation are Vermella con lobos (2004) and The Inland Ice (1997), both of the compilations of rewritten popular tales from a feminist perspective. Since traditional stories tend to be produced from a patriarchal point of view, the main objective of this dissertation is to analyse the mechanisms that these two authors use so as to make of the stories feminist tales and to identify the elements that change from the folk stories to rewritten ones. The aim is to observe each writer’s main features and to compare them in order to see if both use the same criteria or whether these criteria differ from one to another. Structurally speaking, the body of this dissertation will be divided into three chapters, besides the introduction and the conclusions. The first chapter will be dedicated to the analysis of Carmen Blanco’s book. It will be followed by the study of Éllís Ní Dhuibhne’s work, which will constitute the second chapter. Finally, there will be a third chapter with a comparison of two authors