Fairy Tales and Folktales

If there is one genre that has captured the imagination of people in all walks of life throughout the world, it is the fairy tale. Yet we still have great difficulty understanding how it originated, evolved, and spread--or why so many people cannot resist its appeal, no matter how it changes or what form it takes. In this book, renowned fairy-tale expert Jack Zipes presents a provocative new theory about why fairy tales were created and retold--and why they became such an indelible and infinitely adaptable part of cultures around the world. Drawing on cognitive science, evolutionary theory, anthropology, psychology, literary theory, and other fields, Zipes presents a nuanced argument about how fairy tales originated in ancient oral cultures, how they evolved through the rise of literary culture and print, and how, in our own time, they continue to change through their adaptation in an ever-growing variety of media. In making his case, Zipes considers a wide range of fascinating examples, including fairy tales told, collected, and written by women in the nineteenth century; Catherine Breillat's film adaptation of Perrault's "Bluebeard"; and contemporary fairy-tale drawings, paintings, sculptures, and photographs that critique canonical print versions. While we may never be able to fully explain fairy tales, The Irresistible Fairy Tale provides a powerful theory of how and why they evolved--and why we still use them to make meaning of our lives.

Explores Japanese and English transformations of Hans Christian Andersen's 1837 Danish fairy tale "The Little Mermaid" by focusing on pleasure as a means to analyze the huge variety of texts that transform a canonical fairy tale such as Andersen's. Fraser examines over twenty Japanese and English transformations, including literary texts, illustrated books, films, and television series. This monograph also draws upon criticism in both Japanese and English, meeting a need in Western fairy-tale stud

Fairy tales and folktales have long been mainstays of children's literature, celebrated as imaginatively liberating, psychologically therapeutic, and mirrors of foreign culture. Focusing on the fairy tale in nineteenth-century England, where many collections found their largest readership, National Dreams examines influential but critically neglected early experiments in the presentation of international tale traditions to English readers. Jennifer Schacker looks at such wondrous story collections as Grimms' fairy tales and The Arabian Nights in order to trace the larger stories of cross-cultural encounter in which these books were originally embedded.

This volume contains twenty-four of the best known fairy tales in the English language, presented here in the exact words of their first English publication or of the earliest surviving text. Including "Sleeping Beauty," "Bluebeard," "Cinderella," "Thumbelina," and "Hansel and Gretel," as well as many others, this collection provides a historical introduction for each tale and a general Introduction which traces the history of fairy tales collected in Asia and Europe long before they appeared in English.

Murder, mutilation, cannibalism, infanticide, and incest: the darker side of classic fairy tales is the subject of this groundbreaking and intriguing study of Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm's Nursery and Household Tales. This expanded edition includes a new preface and an appendix featuring translations of six tales with commentary by Maria Tatar. Throughout the book, Tatar draws on the disciplinary tools of psychoanalysis and folklore while also providing historical context to explore the harsher aspects of these stories, presenting new interpretations of tales that engage in a kind of cultural repetition compulsion. No other book so thoroughly challenges us to rethink the happily-ever-after of these classic stories.

Sheldon Cashdan explores how fairy tales help children deal with psychological conflicts by projecting their own internal struggles between good and evil onto the battles enacted by the characters in the stories.

The fairy tale is arguably one of the most important cultural and social influences on children's lives. As Jack Zipes convincingly shows in this classic work, fairy tales have always been a powerful discourse, capable of being used to shape or destabilize attitudes and behavior within culture. How and why did certain authors try to influence children or social images of children? How were fairy tales shaped by the changes in European society in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries? Zipes examines famous writers of fairy tales such as Charles Perrault, Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm, Hans Christian Andersen and L.Frank Baum and considers the extraordinary impact of Walt Disney on the genre as a fairy tale filmmaker.

This collection of exemplary essays by internationally recognized scholars examines the fairy tale from historical, folkloristic, literary, and psychoanalytical points of view. For generations of children and adults, fairy tales have encapsulated social values, often through the use of fixed characters and situations, to a far greater extent than any other oral or literary form.