Prince Charming under licence? The totalisation of fairy tales

Abstract

The aim of the paper is to present how the culture of convergence has influenced the fairy tale. Jack Zipes stated that since Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs the “sense of wholeness, seamless totality, and harmony” has become a basic experience of the fairy tales’ audience. The totalisation of the fairy tale is both a continuation and a transformation of the described tendency, claims the author. Creating fairy tales’ universes in comics, TV series, movies etc. and building fairy tales’ supersystems are the expressions of the phenomenon. As opposed to Disney productions, contem-porary fairy tales are patchworks, with visible stitches between heterogenic elements. Due to open composition new elements (plots, characters etc.) could be added without end, but creating connec-tions between them is challenging and nowadays one of the most interesting aspects of fairy tales.