Once Upon a Time:

The Author Is Dead! Long Live the All Mighty Quill!

Abstract

Perchance the world’s greatest advertisement of fairy-tales, Once Upon a Time, the fantasy
drama television series featured on Netflix, goes past its entertaining marketing strategies
and brings to the fore one of the longest enduring and most polemical poststructuralist
theories, i.e. the death of the author and the literary emancipation of characters. The aim of
the current paper is to prove, above anything else, that the primary object of Once Upon a
Time, the TV series can be construed as one of telling the story of the characters’ literary
emancipation and the inherent death of the author.