Fairy Tales in the Anthropocene: A Proposal for Advancing Sustainability Literacy through Jeanette Winterson’s ‘Hansel and Greta’

Fairy tales promise teachers of English as a Foreign Language (EFL) in Swedish primary school an engaging and supposedly simple way to teach both language and cultural content. By its very nature the genre is didactic; it depends on moral absolutism to address questions on how best to live and act in the world. When the content proposes how to live and act sustainably in the Anthropocene, however, a contrast emerges between the clear-cut morality of the fairy tale genre and the complexity of any proposed solutions. In this article we approach Winterson’s fairy tale Hansel and Greta from the perspectives of the three pillars of sustainability as defined by the United Nations, namely environmental sustainability, economic sustainability and social sustainability. We identify a set of productive entry points for Swedish teacher educators to begin from when seeking to develop grades 4–6 (ages 10–12) student teachers’ sustainability literacy and critical literacy, both skills that teachers arguably need to make appropriate selections among the many children’s books that address sustainability. These entry points illustrate instances in the text where tensions spring up between the solutions offered by Winterson’s fairy tale and the complex and often challenging problems that it addresses.