New Approaches to Teaching Folk and Fairy Tales (Introduction) (original) (raw)
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The Ohio State University New Approaches to Teaching Folk and Fairy Tales
2017
MT_31.2_09_BM.indd Page 424 22/11/17 8:27 PM 424 Marvels & Tales: Journal of Fairy-Tale Studies, Vol. 31, No. 2, 2017. doi: 10.13110/marvelstales.31.2.0424 Although such an ambitious project is an extremely difficult undertaking that is bound to please no one completely, Fairy Tales in Popular Culture ultimately falls short of the anthology it hopes to be in several frustrating ways. Even though the variety of materials discussed and some of the selections are useful, I would hesitate to recommend the text overall, even to high school or undergraduate overview classes. Those with a significant stake in fairy-tale scholarship should certainly look elsewhere. Brittany Warman The Ohio State University
Ruth B. Bottigheimer has contended that a specific literary man invented the fairy-tale genre less than five centuries ago. This article is a critical examination of her claim. It interrogates the axioms underlying Bottigheimer’s proposition, probes the logical consistency of her account, and surveys Bottigheimer’s use of empirical evidence. It concludes that while Bottigheimer’s proposition is a healthy challenge to folklorists who would disregard literary texts as a matter of principle, her assumptions, reasoning, and conclusions leave much to be desired.
Fairy Tale More than Fairy Tale
a fairy tale is more than just a fairy tale abstract In focusing on the interaction between various mediations of the fairy tale, Zipes refutes dichotomies of print vs oral controversies that scholars -especially Wilem de Blécourt in Tales of Magic, Tales of Print (2011) and Ruth Bottigheimer in Fairy Tales: A New History (2009) -have been promoting to paint a misinformed history of fairy tales as having literary (rather than oral) origins. Zipes changes the terms of the debate by arguing that researchers should turn their attention to recent sophisticated and innovative theories of storytelling, cultural evolution, human communication and memetics to see how fairy tales enable us to understand why we are disposed towards them and how they 'breathe' life into our daily undertakings.