Fairy Tales as Social Critique in Adaptations by Women Writers

Dr Laura Alexander is Associate Professor of English at High Point University, USA, where she teaches courses on Restoration and Eighteenth-Century British literature and culture, the art of melancholy, fairy tales, world literature, and women writers. She has twice held a national fellowship from the American Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies for research at the Folger Shakespeare Library. She has written more than thirty articles appearing in books and journals, including Eighteenth-Century Fiction, SEL: Studies in English Literature 1600-1900, Restoration and Eighteenth-Century Theatre Research, Papers on Language and Literature, CEA Critic, and English Studies, among others. She won the 2024 Ruth Ridenhour Award for scholarly and professional achievement. She is the author of seven books: Fairy Tales and Social Critique in Adaptations by Women Writers (2025); Transformations of Trauma in Women’s Writing, (2023, paperback published 2024); Women Writing Trauma in Literature (2022, paperback published 2023); The Beauty of Melancholy and British Women Writers, 1670-1720 (2020, paperback published 2022); Fatal Attractions, Abjection, and the Self in Literature from the Restoration to the Romantics (2019); Lucretian Thought in Late Stuart England: Debates about the Nature of the Soul (2013); Dangerous Women, Libertine Epicures, and the Rise of Sensibility, 1670-1730 (2011).