By Marilyn Carpenter, Eastern Washington University, Cheney, WA
Last week I wrote about the challenge of evaluating fairy tales for cultural authenticity and the tools that help meet that challenge. In this post I explore the question: should there be zero tolerance for cultural inaccuracies in fairy tales? I’ll by describing the process of evaluating a novel-length version of Cinderella set in China.
When the book Bound, by Donna Jo Napoli, arrived in my office I grabbed it to read immediately. I had previously read all Napoli’s novel-length versions of the fairy tales like Zel and Beast. These tales were favorites of mine. My students also had enjoyed them. I was eager to have a new book to booktalk for my teen literature class. I was especially interested in Bound since it was a Cinderella story set in China, so I started reading it with a positive view based on my previous experiences with the author and her books.
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Evaluating fairy tales can be a challenge especially if the setting is another culture or country. Serving on the Children’s Literature Assembly for the National Council of Teachers of English 
Fairy tales fueled my imaginary life as a child. In my play I became Snow White, Cinderella, and sometimes even the Prince when my friends insisted they must have a turn at the “main parts.” The romance of the tales captured my interest. Waiting for sleep at night, I would create new versions of the stories, always starring myself as the heroine.
Because I like to travel, as I mentioned in my last post, geography has become of real interest to me. How can we engage international literature without thinking about geography?
First, I like reading about where I have been. The reading is enriched when I can picture it. I pull the images from my memory to help envision the world to which the author has led me. Secondly, the reading enriches my experience of the places I have traveled. It’s also great to find books to read about a place—whether fiction or informational—when planning to travel in it. Some fun texts for cities across the globe are the Miroslav Sasek series such as This is London and This is Rome. These books were written in the 1960s and 1970s, but have “this is today” excerpts that help students see how cities change over time.
If you ask me what I came to do in the world, I, an artist, will answer you: I came here to live out loud. — Emile Zola
I am on a hunt. I am searching for the variety of ways international literature might be conceptualized by teacher educators, teachers, and teacher candidates. I am also interested in the ways in which they might address and differentiate between international and multicultural literature as well as how they perceive various other terms that might be used for literature that, well, transcends its native borders. I became interested in such a venture because it seemed as though as much as I discussed what I suggested was the difference between, say, “international” and “multicultural” literature, the terms and their nuances seldom transferred to my students. Was I not trying hard enough? Was I being too esoteric? Needless to say, I found the phenomenon intriguing, and so thought I would broach the topic via WOW Currents.
This is the fourth of a planned four-part interview with Nick Glass, member of the 2009 Newbery Committee, conducted electronically by Judi Moreillon.