Writing Style, Common Themes and Recurring Elements
The book features many recurring themes and elements throughout the story. One recurring element is the alternate spellings of "wommon" and "womyn" (instead of "woman" and "women"). Additionally, the inclusion of distinctly modern concepts (such as Goldilocks being a rogue biologist, or Red Riding Hood bringing her grandmother mineral water) is common throughout the book, in keeping with the concept of "updating" classic fairy tales for modern times. Another common element is that many of the previous heroes or villains have had a role reversal, with female villains usually becoming more enlightened or empowered and befriending the heroine. Female characters (with few exceptions) rescue themselves after being similarly empowered and enlightened.
The protagonist of each story purportedly conform to the above-mentioned ideologies to absurd, obsessive levels. The satirical style used throughout the book, from the introduction to every one of the stories and then some, is that of an overly cautious, excessively verbose author who so fears offending or maligning any one reader that he is continually sidetracked and preoccupied by using politically correct (or pseudo-politically correct) terminology and phrasing, to the point of ridiculousness and redundancy. However, the book is absent of polemics—its stories are styled only upon a deadpan context of removing of all traditional bias, stereotype and prejudice from well-known fiction, under the pretense of not warping young minds.
Read more about this topic: Politically Correct Bedtime Stories
Famous quotes containing the words writing, common, themes, recurring and/or elements:
“What is line? It is life. A line must live at each point along its course in such a way that the artist’s presence makes itself felt above that of the model.... With the writer, line takes precedence over form and content. It runs through the words he assembles. It strikes a continuous note unperceived by ear or eye. It is, in a way, the soul’s style, and if the line ceases to have a life of its own, if it only describes an arabesque, the soul is missing and the writing dies.”
—Jean Cocteau (1889–1963)
“Poetry, at all times, exercises two distinct functions: it may reveal, it may unveil to every eye, the ideal aspects of common things ... or it may actually add to the number of motives poetic and uncommon in themselves, by the imaginative creation of things that are ideal from their very birth.”
—Walter Pater (1839–1894)
“I suppose you think that persons who are as old as your father and myself are always thinking about very grave things, but I know that we are meditating the same old themes that we did when we were ten years old, only we go more gravely about it.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“America is the world’s living myth. There’s no sense of wrong when you kill an American or blame America for some local disaster. This is our function, to be character types, to embody recurring themes that people can use to comfort themselves, justify themselves and so on. We’re here to accommodate. Whatever people need, we provide. A myth is a useful thing.”
—Don Delillo (b. 1926)
“Three elements go to make up an idea. The first is its intrinsic quality as a feeling. The second is the energy with which it affects other ideas, an energy which is infinite in the here-and-nowness of immediate sensation, finite and relative in the recency of the past. The third element is the tendency of an idea to bring along other ideas with it.”
—Charles Sanders Peirce (1839–1914)