Binary Oppositions in Traditional and Postmodern Fairy Tales

Sivak, A. Binary Oppositions in Traditional and Postmodern Fairy Tales: Master’s thesis in Philology / supervised by V. Yefymenko. Kyiv, 2025. 107 p.

The fairy tale genre, with its deep-rooted narrative traditional and symbolic structures, continues to serve as a rich field for literary analysis. One of the key mechanisms shaping fairy tale storytelling is the use of binary oppositions which reflect cultural values, moral lessons and ideological frameworks.
The research paper focuses on the analysis of binary oppositions as a structural and semantic feature of fairy tale narratives. The study examines how binary pairs shape character development, plot structure, and thematic focus in two contrasting collections: “English Fairy Tales” (1918) by Flora Annie Steel, representing the traditional canon, and “The Bloody Chamber and Other Stories” (1992), as a postmodern reinterpretation of fairy tale conventions.
The analysis reveals that traditional tales predominantly rely on moral and social, oppositions to convey didactic lessons and reinforce societal norms. In contrast, Carter’s postmodern stories deconstruct these binaries, shifting the focus toward ontological, gendered and existential conflicts, thereby challenging established norms and emphasizing subjectivity and transformation.
Using descriptive, comparative, contextual, structural-semantic, and qualitative-quantitative methods, around 400 binary pairs were identified and grouped into semantic categories (moral-ethical, social, spatial, gendered, cognitive, temporal, etc.). The dual perspective enables a detailed comparison of the ideological functions and literary evolution of binary oppositions in fairy tales from diachronic viewpoint. It also underlines the significance of binary logic in both preserving cultural models and providing their interpretation through literature.