Snow White is one of several works of the 1960s and 1970s that recycles myths and fairy tales: John Gardner's Grendel (1971), John Barth's Chimera (1972), Robert Coover's Pricksongs and Descants (1969), and Angela Carter's The Bloody Chamber (1979). In defense of James Joyce's high-modernist novel, Ulysses (1922), T. S. Eliot defined what he called "mythic method" — "the drawing of a continuous parallel between the ancient and the modern in order to make sense of the enormous panorama of anarchy and futility which is contemporary life." The postmodern writers are interested less in a continuous parallel (and the depth and resonance it implies) than in the factitiousness of the original story as a convention worthy of exploitation as well as exploration, a semiotic code worth cracking in order to sift through what Coover has called the "mythic residue." What results is not so much parallelism as anachronism, divergence...