It is a dark and stormy night and the rain falling on the typewriter keys writes a story in German about a great-aunt who went to a symposium on narrative and got eaten in the forest by a metabear. (Ursula Le Guin)

This is the website of Jessica Tiffin. I’m a student advisor and part-time lecturer and researcher in the Faculty of Humanities at the University of Cape Town. My research interests are in modern metafictional fairy tale, fantasy and science fiction, romance, Gothic literature, children’s literature, the Victorians, and internet culture. A common thread is self-awareness in literature, particularly literary genre. My doctorate, entitled “Marvellous geometry: narrative and metafiction in modern fairy tale”, was published by Wayne State University Press in their Fairy Tale Series in 2009. I am currently teaching the erotic in internet culture, and supervising postgraduate theses in fairy tale, vampire literature and other genre topics.

My student development post doesn’t leave me nearly enough time for writing, but current research work in progress includes Harry Potter and pedagogy, Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein in comparison with Tepper’s Grass, folkloric elements in Studio Ghibli films, Catherynne M. Valente’s fairy-tale poetry, and self-consciousness in the Edwardian fairy tales of E. Nesbit.

Marvelous Geometry: Narrative and Metafiction in Modern Fairy Tale, (Fairy-tale Studies). Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 2009.