Repetition and variant in the times of hypertext. From Sleeping Beauty to Briar Rose, by Robert Coover

Abstract

In Briar Rose, Robert Coover resorts once again to the repertoire of traditional tales, which he had already employed in the Pricksong & Descants stories, to create his own version of Sleeping Beauty. In order to understand the complexity of the matter converging on Briar Rose, it is necessary to add, to the intertexts that the critics have pointed out (that is, the tales of the Brothers Grimm, Perrault and Basile), the versions that preceded them in the Western tradition of the motif. This widening of the perspective will allow us to appreciate how repetition and variant –resources that Coover, as well as other postmodernist authors, has used to deconstruct the traditional narrative– are, paradoxically, central elements that have cemented the survival of that tale through the centuries.