Grimm Realities

Through its six-season run, television’s Grimm used the extraordinary to illuminate the complexity of the ordinary. Drawing on the Brothers Grimm folklore, the series crafted an enchanted present to illuminate social and ethical challenges facing Western—in particular American—culture at the beginning of the 21st century. This collection of new essays explores Grimm’s critique of identity and justice in the modern world contexts of race and ethnicity, gender and sexuality, environmentalism, genre and heroism, with a focus on the show’s disruptive adaptation of fairy tales and reinterpretation of the police procedural in a fantasy landscape.

Daniel Farr is a senior lecturer of sociology at Kennesaw State University, in Kennesaw, Georgia. He has edited special journal issues for Fat Studies, Lesbian Studies, Men and Masculinities and Women’s Studies.

Melanie D. Holm is an associate professor of English and co-director of the Dessy-Roffman Myth Collaborative at Indiana University of Pennsylvania in Indiana, Pennsylvania. She has published in Philological Quarterly, Restoration, The Eighteenth Century and Aphra Behn.

Edited by Daniel Farr and Melanie D. Holm
Format: softcover (6 x 9)
Pages: 230
Bibliographic Info: notes, bibliographies, index
Copyright Date: 2023
pISBN: 978-1-4766-8266-2
eISBN: 978-1-4766-4650-3
Imprint: McFarland

Acknowledgments v

Introduction—Melanie D. Holm 1

Part One: Identity and Identification

All About Eve: Juliette’s Original Sin—Melanie D. Holm 19

Liminal Spaces and Identity in Grimm—Andrea Yingling 36

Opening the Trailer Door to Queer Possibilities—Daniel Farr 52

Grimm: Fantasy, Procedurals, and Rape Culture—Anastasia Rose Hyden 69

Part Two: Justice and Social Spaces

Grimm: Disillusioning Privilege and Developing a Practice of Listening—Matthew Grinder 87

The Wesen Next Door: The Racial Dynamics of Grimm—Melanie D. Holm 104

Folk Creatures: What Can Justice Do with These People?—Fernando Gabriel Pagnoni Berns and Emiliano Aguilar 123

Witches, Stepmothers, and Princesses: Rethinking Gender and Money in Grimm—Sarah Revilla-Sanchez 140

­Pro-Animal Ideology and the Philosophy of Coexistence: An Ecocritical Perspective on Grimm—Tatiana Konrad 155

Part Three: Media and Genre

Who’s Still Afraid of the Wolf? ­Fairy-Tale Characters as a Medium of Cultural Change—Sara Casoli 171

It Is Up to the “One” … Or Is It? The Significance of Others in ­21st-Century TV Hero Tales—Kathleen McDonald 188

Grimm Afterlives: The Show Lives On in the Media ­Tie-In Novels—Rachel Noorda 202

About the Contributors 217

Index 219