The Postmodern Interpretation of Fairy Tale Motifs in Contemporary American Literature

Postmodern American prose has turned to traditional fairy-tale material with remarkable persistence, transforming inherited motifs through irony, metafiction and genre hybridisation. This article investigates how contemporary writers deploy fairy-tale plot structures, archetypal imagery and intertextual echoes to interrogate questions of identity, gender, power and authorship. A corpus of twenty-one short stories and novels published between 1967 and 2024 was subjected to close narratological and intertextual analysis grounded in the theories of Lyotard, Hutcheon and Zipes. The study identifies three dominant modes of postmodern re-appropriation—deconstruction, defamiliarisation and ethical re-orientation—and demonstrates that these modes function as dialogic devices enabling writers to question master narratives while retaining the imaginative charge of the folk inheritance. Findings reveal that postmodern re-visions neither merely parody nor nostalgically resurrect fairy tales; rather, they create polyphonic spaces in which competing discourses on agency, trauma and belonging co-exist. The article concludes that fairy-tale motifs in American postmodernism perform a double labour: anchoring texts in a shared cultural memory and simultaneously exposing the instability of that memory in a pluralistic, media-saturated society.