This volume offers a comprehensive critical and theoretical introduction to the genre of the fairy tale. It:
- explores the ways in which folklorists have defined the genre;
- assesses the various methodologies used in the analysis and interpretation of fairy tale;
- provides a detailed account of the historical development of the fairy tale as a literary form;
- engages with the major ideological controversies that have shaped critical and creative approaches to fairy tales in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries;
- demonstrates that the fairy tale is a highly metamorphic genre that has flourished in diverse media, including oral tradition, literature, film, and the visual arts.
A clear and illuminating guide, Fairy Tale offers an essential resource for the field.
Author(s): Andrew Teverson
Series: The New Critical Idiom
Publisher: Routledge
Year: 2013
Language: English
Pages: X+168
Series editor’s preface viii
Acknowledgements ix
Introduction 1
1. Definitions 10
2. The emergence of a literary genre: Early Modern Italy to the French salon 38
3. The consolidation of a genre: the Brothers Grimm to Hans Christian Andersen 61
4. The emergence of fairy-tale theory: Plato to Propp 83
5. Psychoanalysis, history and ideology: twentieth- and twenty-first-century approaches to fairy tale 109
Conclusion 140
Glossary 144
Bibliography 152
Index 160
