Fairy Tales:
A Select Reading List of Secondary Sources

by William Barker

Note Call numbers are for the library of Dalhousie University. Location of books not at Dalhousie but available at Mount Saint Vincent University (MSVU) or St Mary's University (SMU) are also indicated. I have many of the articles and books so if you are having trouble locating anything on the list, please ask me if I have a copy. The literature is vast and much of it is in German. Here I concentrate on material in English and on the main literary tradition represented by Perrault and Grimm. Starred items will be discussed in whole or in part in class. This list was last revised on 4 April 2004.

Aarne, Antti. The Types of the Folktale: A Classification and Bibliography. Trans. and enlarged by Stith Thompson. 2nd revision. Helsinki: Suomalainen Tiedeakatemia, 1961. [GR 40 A1513 1961] (A listing and categorization of hundreds of story types. The method is criticized in Propp, "The Principles of Classifying Folklore Genres" in his Theory and History of Folklore, pp. 39-47, below, and by others, but the book is one of the basic studies. A useful accompaniment to Aarne-Thompson is D.L. Ashliman, A Guide to Folktales in the English Language: Based on the Aarne-Thompson Classification System [New York: Greenwood Press, 1987] [MSVU and SMU reference Z 5983 F17 A83 1987 non circulating].)

Anderson, Graham. Fairy Tale in the Ancient World. London and New York: Routledge, 2000.

Auden, W.H. "Grimm and Andersen." In Forewords and Afterwords. Ed. Edward Mendelson. New York: Random House/Vintage, 1973. 198-208. [PN 511 A8] (A very short but enlightening essay, first published 1952.)

Bacchilega, Cristina. Postmodern Fairy Tales: Gender and Narrative Strategies. Philadelphia : University of Pennsylvania Press, 1997. [MSVU -- GR 550 B33 1997]

Barchilon, Jacques. "Beauty and the Beast: From Myth to Fairy Tale." Psychoanalysis and the Psychoanalytic Review 46 (1959): 19-29.

---. "Uses of the Fairy Tale in the Eighteenth Century." Studies on Voltaire and the Eighteenth Century 24 (1963): 111-138. [PQ 2105 A2 S8]

Bell, Elizabeth, Lynda Haas, and Laura Sells, eds. From Mouse to Mermaid: The Politics of Film, Gender, and Culture. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1995. [MSVU -- PN 1999 W27 F76 1995] (Includes, among other essays: Zipes, "Breaking the Disney Spell"; Giroux, "Memory and Pedagogy in the 'Wonderful World of Disney'"; Card, "Pinocchio"; Bell, "Somatexts at the Disney Shop: Constructing the Pentimentos of Women's Animated Bodies"; "'The Whole World was Scrubbed Clean': The Androcentric Animation of Denatured Disney"; Jeffords, "The Curse of Masculinity: Disney's Beauty and the Beast"; Sells, "'Where Do the Mermaids Stand?': Voice and Body in The Little Mermaid"; Haas, "'Eighty-Six the Mother': Murder, Matricide, and Good Mothers")

Benjamin, Walter. "The Storyteller: Reflections on the Works of Nicolai Leskov." In Illuminations. Trans. Harry Zohn. New York: Schocken Books, 1969. 83-109. [PN 37 B4413 1986] (A remarkable piece on storytelling by one of the greatest of 20th-century critics. You don't have to know anything about Leskov to get a lot from this essay. Some folklorists have trouble with this essay which is not very clear on the problems of transmission and performance. Zipes' response is generally approving: "Revisiting Benjamin's 'The Storyteller': Reviving the Past to Move Forwards" in Happily Ever After, 129-42, 152.)

Bettelheim, Bruno. The Uses of Enchantment: The Meaning and Importance of Fairy Tales. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1976. [GR 550 B47 1976] (Bettelheim's largely Freudian interpretation is rejected by Zipes, Breaking the Magic Spell, chapter 6, and by Heisig, both listed below. Alan Dundes, a folklore scholar, has shown that Bettelheim may have plagiarized work from an earlier scholar writing in German. Yet Bettelheim's book has been very influential in introducing readers to the possibility of a serious, psychological reading of children's literature and can be read with profit, even if only to disagree. For other psychological critics, see Marie-Louise von Franz and Erich Fromm, below.)

Blackwell, Jeannine. "The Many Names of Rumpelstiltskin: Recent Research on the Grimms' Kinder- und Haus-Märchen." The Germanic Quarterly 63 (1990): 107-22.

Bloch, Ernst. "Introduction" (1:3-18) and "Better Castles in the Air in Fair and Circus, in Fairytale and Colportage" (1:352-69) in The Principle of Hope, trans. Neville Plaice, Stephen Plaice and Paul Knight. 3 vols. Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1986. [KINGS, MSVU, SMU]

---. "The Fairy Tale Moves on in its Own Time" in The Utopian Function of Art and Literature. Trans Jack Zipes and Frank Mecklenburg. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1988. 162-6. [B 3209 B753 U87 1988]

Bolte, Johannes, and Georg Polívka. Anmerkungen zu den Kinder- und Hausmärchen der Brüder Grimm. 5 vols. Leipzig: Dieterich, 1913-32. Rpt. Hildesheim: Georg Olms, 1963. [ PT 921 B63 1963] (An extraordinary reference work that compiles all the known versions for each of the tales collected by Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm.)

Bottigheimer, Ruth B. Fairy Godfather: Straparola, Venice, and the Fairy Tale Tradition. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania, 2002.

---, ed. Fairy Tales and Society: Illusion, Allusion, and Paradigm. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1986. [MSVU and SMU -- GR550.F25 1986] (A collection of essays on a wide range of topics relating to fairy and folk tales. Offers a glimpse into the current methods and concerns of research in folklore studies.)

---. Grimms' Bad Girls and Bold Boys: The Moral and Social Vision of the "Tales". New Haven and London: Yale UP, 1987. [PT 921 B67 1987] (A study of motif, plot, and image in the tales collected by the Brothers Grimm.)

---. "The Transformed Queen: A Search for the Origins of Negative Female Archetypes in Grimms' Fairy Tales." Amsterdamer Beiträge zur neueren Germanistik 10 (1980) 1-12.

Brewer, Derek. Symbolic Stories: Traditional Narratives of the Family Drama in English Literature. Cambridge: D.S. Brewer, 1980. [PR 149 F34 B7 1980] (For the presentation of the family in fairy tales, see pp. 15-53.)

Butor, Michel. "On Fairy Tales." Inventory: Essays. Trans. Richard Howard. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1968. 211-23. [PQ 2603 U73 I5]

Canepa, Nancy. From Court to Forest: Giambattista Basile's Lo Cunto de li Cunti and the Birth of the Literary Fairy Tale. Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1999.

---, ed. Out of the Woods: The Origins of the Literary Fairy Tale in Italy and France. Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1997. [PN 808 O97 1997]

Cox, Marian Roalfe. Cinderella: Three Hundred and Forty-five Variants ... 1892; rpt. Nendeln: Kraus Reprint, 1967. [GR 75 C4 C5] (See also Dundes and Philips below.)

Crane, T.F. "The External History of the Kinder- und Hausmärchen of the Brothers Grimm." Modern Philology 14 (1917): 577-610; 15.2 (1917): 65-77; 15.6 (1917): 355-383. [On-line from Dalhousie.]

Darnton, Robert. "Peasants Tell Tales: The Meaning of Mother Goose" in his The Great Cat Massacre and Other Episodes in French Cultural History. New York: Basic Books, 1984. 9-72. [DC 33.4 D37 1984] (A historical context for the Mother Goose stories, looked at from the peasant end of society. Contrast this with the approach by Thelander, below.)

David, Alfred, and Mary Elizabeth David, "A Literary Approach to the Brothers Grimm." Journal of the Folklore Institute 1 (1964): 180-196.

Dégh, Linda. "Folk Narrative" in Richard M. Dorson, ed. Folklore and Folklife: An Introduction. Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1972. 53-83. [GR 65 D7] (An authoritative summary of the scholarship and approaches up to the time of writing and still an excellent guide to the subject.)

---. Folktales and Society: Story-telling in a Hungarian Peasant Community. Trans. Emily M. Schossberger. Bloomington, Indiana University Press, 1969. [GR 158 D4253]

---. "Grimms' Household Tales and Its Place in the Household: The Social Relevance of a Controversial Classic." Western Folklore 38 (1979): 83-103. (This essay, which offers a compact history of the composition and reception of the Grimms' tales, is well known to scholars. Reprinted in Michael M. Metzger and Katharina Mommsen, ed., Fairy Tales as Ways of Knowing: Essays on Märchen in Psychology, Society and Literature [Bern, etc.: Peter Lang, 1981], 21-53; the collection also has Linda Dégh's "The Magic Tale and Its Magic," 54-74 [GR 550 F28 1981].)

---. "What Did the Brothers Grimm Give to and Take from the Folk?" in McGlathery et al., eds., The Brothers Grimm and Folktale, 66-90.

Delarue, Paul. "Les Contes merveilleux de Perrault et la tradition populaire: introduction." Bulletin folklorique de l"Ile de France, ns 12 (1951): 195-201.

---. "Les contes merveilleux de Perrault: faits et rapprochements nouveaux" Arts et traditions populaires (1954) 1-22, 251-75.

Dickens, Charles. "Frauds on the Fairies" in Household Words 8 (1853-4) 97-100. (Dickens celebrated attack on the Fairy Library of George Cruikshank, with Dickens' own version of the Cinderella story. The article was published 1 October 1853. Cruikshank replied in a broadsheet, in an article in George Cruikshank's Magazine, February 1854, and in an attached appendix to his Puss in Boots, one of his later fairy tales. In these he is also answering another item by Dickens, "Whole Hogs" Household Words 3 (1851) 505-7, an attack on fanatics of temperance, vegetarianism, etc. Cruikshank was a reformed drunk. For background, see Harry Stone, "Dickens, Cruikshank, and Fairy Tales," Princeton University Library Chronicle 35.1-2 [1973-4]: 212-47 [a copy of this issue is at MSVU as George Cruikshank: A Revaluation, ed. Robert L. Patten]; there is also Michael Kotzin, Dickens and the Fairy Tale [Bowling Green: Bowling Green University Popular Press, 1972] [PR 4588 K65 1972].)

Dorfman, Ariel. The Empire's Old Clothes: What the Lone Ranger, Babar, and Other Innocent Heroes Do to Our Minds. New York: Pantheon, 1983. [PN 56 P55 D66 1983] (A disquieting look at some of the characters in popular culture, examined from a leftist point of view. By the author of How to Read Donald Duck: Imperialist Ideology in the Disney Comic [London: International General, 1975] [SMU, NSCAD] which has been translated and read all over the world.)

Dorson, Richard. "The Eclipse of Solar Mythology" Journal of American Folklore 68 (1955): 393-416. [Online at Dalhousie] (An account of a fascinating chapter in the history of interpretation of folklore which explains the recurrent images in myths and tales as originating in ancient Indo-European myths. The theory was rejected, though the approach still lingers on in the Jungian theories of tales. Reprinted in Dundes, ed., The Study of Folklore, 53-83.)

Dundes, Alan. "Bruno Bettehleim's Uses of Enchantment and Abuses of Scholarship." Journal of American Folklore 104 (1991): 74-83. [Online at Dalhousie]

---, ed. Cinderella: A Folklore Casebook. New York: Garland, 1982. [MSVU, SMU] (See also Cox, above, and Philips, below, both on Cinderella; also Hearne on Bluebeard and Zipes on Little Red Riding Hood, below.)

---. "Interpreting Little Red Riding Hood Psychoanalytically" in McGlathery et al., eds., The Brothers Grimm and Folktale, 16-51. (Reprinted in Dundes, ed., Little Red Riding Hood: A Casebook, next item)

---, ed. Little Red Riding Hood: A Folklore Casebook. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1989. [MSVU]

---. "The Psychoanalytic Study of the Grimms' Tales with Special Reference to 'The Maiden Without Hands' (AT 706)." Germanic Review 42 (1987): 50-65. [PD 1 G37]

---, ed. The Study of Folklore. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1965. [GR 45 D8] (An excellent collection with some important essays reprinted: e.g., Dorson, Olrick, Raglan.)

---. "The Symbolic Equivalence of Allomotifs in the Rabbit-Hert (AT 570)." Arv (1980): 91-98.

---. "The Symbolic Equivalence of Allomotifs: Towards a Method of Analyzing Folktales." In Geneviève Calame-Griaule, et al., eds., Le conte, pourquoi? comment? / Folktales, Why and How? Paris: Editions du Centre de la Recherche Scientifique, 1984. 187-97.

Ellis, John M. One Fairy Story Too Many: The Brothers Grimm and Their Tales. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1983. [MSVU, SMU] (Ellis's vigorously argued position that that the Grimm brothers did not tell the whole truth about their method of collection and writing of the tales is in part rebutted by Jack Zipes "Mountains out of Mole Hills, a Fairy Story," Children's Literature 13 [1985] 215-19. [SMU, MSVU])

Fine, Elizabeth. The Folklore Text: From Performance to Print. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1984. [SMU -- GR 40 F47 1994] (Outlines methods in analysis of performance, an aspect of story-telling that is important in the history of the transmission of folktale and fairy tale.)

Fischer, J.L. "The Sociopsychological Analysis of Folktales." Current Anthropology 4 (1963): 235-95. [Online at Dalhousie]

von Franz, Marie-Louise. The Interpretation of Fairy Tales. Revised edition. Boston: Shambala, 1996. (Von Franz is a Jungian psychologist. Her books are all interpretations based on the archetypal psychology of C.G. Jung.)

---. An Introduction to the Psychology of Fairy Tales. New York: Spring, 1970.

---. Problems of the Feminine in Fairytales. Dallas: Spring Publications, 1972. [MSVU]

---. Shadow and Evil in Fairy Tales. Boston: Shambhala, 1995. [GR 550 F72 1995]

Fromm, Erich. The Forgotten Language: An Introduction to the Understanding of Dreams, Fairy Tales and Myths. New York: Rinehart, 1951. [BF 1078 F93] (A general study of dream symbolism, with a short section on Little Red Ridinghood, by a celebrated psycho-analyst in the Freudian tradition, though tempered by an awareness that his theory has an economic and social significance.)

Gilbert, Sandra M., and Susan Gubar. The Madwoman in the Attic: The Woman Writer and the Nineteenth-Century Literary Imagination. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1979. [PR 115 G5] (One of the standard texts in feminist literary criticism. Has a number of passages on fairy tales.)

Haase, Donald, ed. The Reception of Grimms' Fairy Tales : Responses, Reactions, Revisions. Detroit : Wayne State University Press, 1993. [MSVU -- PT 921 R4 1993] Siegfried Neumann, "The Brothers Grimm as Collectors and Editors of German Folktales"; Ines Köhler-Zülch, "Heinrich Pröhle: A Successor to the Borthers Grimm"; Brian Alderson, "The Spoken and the Read: German Popular Stories and English Popular Diction"; Ruth B. Bottigheimer, "The Publishing History of Grimms' Tales: Reception at the Cash Register"; Shawn Jarvis, "Trivial Pursuit? Women Deconstructing the Grimmian Model in the Kaffeterkreis"; Richard Perkins, "Little Brier Rose: Young Nietzsche's Sleeping Beauty Poem as Legend and Swan Song"; Wolfgang Mieder, "Fairy-Tale Allusions in Modern German Aphorisms"; Jack Zipes, "The Struggle for the Grimms' Throne: The Legacy of the Grimms' Tales in the FRG and the GDR since 1945"; Maria Tatar, "Wilhelm Grimm/Maurice Sendak: Dear Mili and the Literary Culture of Childhood"; Donald Haase, "Response and Responsibility in Reading Grimms' Fairy Tales"; Kay Stone, "Once Upon a TIme for Today: Grimm Tales for Contemporary Performers"; Jacques Barchilon, "Personal Reflections on the Scholarly Reception of Grimms' Tales in France"; Jane Yolen, "The Brothers Grimm and Sister Jane"; Margaret Atwood, "Grimms' Remembered"; Trina Schart Hyman, "'Cut it Down, and You Will Find Something at the Roots'"; Angela Carter, "Ashputtle: or, The Mother's Ghost")

Hearne, Betsy. Beauty and the Beast: Visions and Revisions of an Old Tale. Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1989. [MSVU -- PQ 1995 L75 B434 1989] (A fine analysis of a single story and its variants, unfortunately a bit too early for the Walt Disney movie; see also Dundes and Zipes.)

Heisig, James W. "Bruno Bettelheim and the Fairy Tales." Children's Literature 6 (1977): 93-115. [PN 1009 A1 C514] (A critique of Bettelheim's book.)

Holbek, Bengt. Interpretation of Fairy Tales. Helsinki: Suomalainen Tiedeakatemia, 1987. (FF Communications no 239) (A massive account of the imaginative structure of the fairy tale as it moves from the oral to the written form. Though the concentration is on Danish materials, the several-hundred-page section on "Method" is a wide-ranging survey of critical approaches to the fairy tale.)

---. "The Language of Fairy Tales." In Nordic Folklore: Recent Studies. Ed R. Kvideland and H.K. Sehmsdorf. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1989. 40-62.[UCCB] (A short statement of the theoretical direction taken in Holbek's longer magisterial study.)

Jolles, André. Einfache Formen. Legende, Sage, Mythe, Rätsel, Spruch, Kasus, Memorabile, Märchen, Witz. [1930]. Tübingen: M. Niemeyer, 1958. [PN 45 J75 1958] (Also available in a French translation: Formes simples. Trans. Antoine Marie Buguet. Paris: Seuil, 1972.)

Jones, Steven Swann. The Fairy Tale: The Magic Mirror of Imagination. Boston: Twayne, 1995; rev. ed. New York: Routledge, 2002. [GR 550 J68 2002]

Jung, C.G. "The Phenomenology of the Trickster in Fairytales." In Archetypes and the Collective Unconscious [Collected Works 9/1]. Trans. R.F.C. Hull. Princeton: Princeton UP, 1959. [King's BF 23 J763 v.9 pt.1]

Kamenetsky, Christa. The Brothers Grimm and their Critics: Folktales and the Quest for Meaning. Athens: Ohio University Press, 1992. [MSVU -- PD 63 K36 1992]

King, James Roy. Old Tales and New Truths: Charting the Bright-shadow World. Albany: State University of New York Press, 1992. [GR 550 K56 1992]

Knoepflmacher, U.C. Ventures into Childland : Victorians, Fairy Tales, and Femininity. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998. [PR 990 K58 1998]

Lewis, Philip. Seeing through the Mother Goose Tales: Visual Turns in the Writings of Charles Perrault. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1996. [MSVU -- PQ 1877 L49 1996]

Lieberman, Marcia. "'Some Day My Prince Will Come': Female Acculturation through the Fairy Tale." College English 34 (1972): 383-95. [Online at Dalhousie] (A feminist reading of fairy tales. Also reprinted in Zipes, Don't Bet on the Prince, pp. 185-200, below; for a bleaker feminist reading, see Gilbert and Gubar, The Madwoman in the Attic, above.)

Lüthi, Max. The European Folktale: Form and Nature. Trans. John D. Niles. Philadelphia: Institute for the Study of Human Issues, 1982. [MSVU, SMU]

---. The Fairy Tale as Art Form and Portrait of Man. Trans. Jon Erickson. Bloomington: University of Indiana Press, 1985. [PN 3437 L79813 1984] (One of the most interesting of the full-length critical studies of the genre by one of the greatest scholars in the field. This will seem a bit difficult to the beginner.)

---. Once upon a Time: On the Nature of Fairy Tales. Trans. Lee Chadeayne and Paul Gottwald. New York: Frederick Ungar, 1970. [MSVU] (A shorter and more accessible discussion than the preceding.)

Marin, Louis. "Puss-in-Boots: Power of Signs -- Signs of Power." Diacritics 7.2 (Summer 1977): 54-63. [Online from Dalhousie]

McGlathery, James M. Fairy Tale Romance: The Grimms, Basile, and Perrault. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1991. [MSVU -- PN 3437 M34 1991]

---. Grimm's Fairy Tales: A History of Criticism on a Popular Classic. Columbia, SC : Camden House, c1993. [MSVU -- PT 921 M38 1993]

---, with Larry W. Danielson, Ruth E. Lorbe, and Selma K. Richardson, eds. The Brothers Grimm and Folktale. Urbana : University of Illinois Press, 1988.

Meletinsky, Eleazar, et al. "Problems of the Structural Analysis of Fairy-tales." In Soviet Structuralist Folkloristics, ed. P. Maranda. The Hague: Mouton, 1974. 73-189. [GR 40 M27]

Mieder, Wolfgang. "Grim Variations: From Fairy Tales to Modern Anti-Fairy Tales." The Germanic Review, 62 (1987): 90-102. [PD 1 G37]

Murphy, G. Ronald. The Owl, the Raven, and the Dove: The Religious Meaning of the Grimms' Magic Fairy Tales. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002. [MSVU -- GR 166 M87 2000]

Olrick, Axel. "Epic Laws of Folk Narrative." In Alan Dundes, ed. The Study of Folklore. Englewood Cliffs: Prentice-Hall, 1965. [GR 45 D8]

Orenstein, Catherine. Little Red Riding Hood Uncloaked: Sex, Morality, and the Evolution of a Fairy Tale. New York: Basic Books, 2002. (An intelligent popularization of material that can be found in the collections by Dundes and Zipes.) [MSVU -- GR 75 L56 O74 2002]

Ortutay, Gyula. "Principles of Oral Transmission in Folk Culture." Acta Ethnographica 8 (1959): 175-221.

Palmer, Melvin D. "Madame D'Aulnoy in England." Comparative Literature 27 (1975): 237-53. [Online from Dalhousie]

Philip, Neil. The Cinderella Story. London: Penguin Books, 1989. [MSVU -- Reserve] (Twenty-four versions of the Cinderella story, treated at greater length by Cox and by Dundes, above.)

Propp, Vladimir. The Morphology of the Folktale. Trans. Laurence Scott. 2nd ed. Austin: University of Texas Press, 1968. [GR 550 P7613 1968] (A study of story structures in the folktale. First published in Russian in 1928. This influential work is quite technical but short. It was criticized by Claude Lévi-Strauss, the French anthropologist, in 1960; his essay, and Propp's intemperate rebuttal, are given in English in Propp, Theory and History, 167-88 and 67-81 respectively.)

---. Theory and History of Folklore. Trans. Ariadna Y. Martin and Richard P. Martin. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1984. [GR 202 P7513 1984] (An anthology of writings by Propp; for the more advanced reader.)

Raglan, Fitzroy Richard Somerset, Baron. The Hero: A Study in Tradition, Myth, and Drama. London: Methuen, 1936. [BL 325 H5 R1] (First given as a lecture to the English Folklore Society in 1934, the shorter version "The Hero of Tradition" is reprinted in Dundes, ed., The Study of Folklore, 142-57. Raglan enumerates 22 stages in the life story of the hero. See article by Archer Taylor, below, who summarizes the scholarship.)

Rank, Otto. The Myth of the Birth of the Hero and Other Writings. Trans. F. Robbins and S.E. Jelliffe, et al. Ed. Philip Freund. New York: Vintage Books/Random House, 1964. [BL 313 R263 1964] (The title essay is a description of the story cycle of the hero, written from an early psycho-analytic viewpoint. First published in English in 1914. See article by Archer Taylor, below, who summarizes the scholarship.)

Rebel, Hermann. "Why Not 'Old Marie' . . . or Someone Very Much Like Her? A Reassessment of the Question about the Grimms' Contributors from a Social Historical Perspective." Social History 13 (1988): 1-24. [HN 1 S57]

Röhrich, Lutz. Folktales and Reality. Trans. Peter Tokofsky. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1991.

Róheim, Géza. Fire in the Dragon and Other Psychoanalytic Essays on Folklore. Ed. Alan Dundes. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1992.

Rowe, Karen E. "Feminism and Fairy Tales." Women's Studies 6 (1979): 237-57. [HQ 1101 W64]

Sale, Roger. Fairy Tales and After: From Snow White to E.B. White. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1978. [PN 1009 A1 S24]

Seifert, Lewis C. Fairy Tales, Sexuality, and Gender in France, 1690-1715 : Nostalgic Utopias. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996. [MSVU -- PQ 637 F27 S45 1996]

Soriano, Marc. "From Tales of Warning to Formulettes: The Oral Tradition in French Children's Literature." Yale French Studies 43 (1969): 24-56. [Online at Dalhousie]

---. Les Contes de Perrault. Culture savante et traditions populaires. Rev. ed. Paris: Gallimard, 1977. [ PQ 1877 A72 S6 1969 printing] (An excellent study of Perrault, which sets out to explain why Perrault undertook to write the tales for children and to what extent they embody important philosophical and cultural insights. The second edition is prefaced by an interview of Soriano by Jacques Le Goff and Emannual Le Roy Ladurie, two leading historians.)

Stone, Kay F."Burning Brightly: New Light From an Old Tale," in Joan Radner, ed. Feminist Messages: Coding in Women's Folk Culture. Urbana, Il: University of Illinois Press, 1993. [SMU]

---. Burning Brightly: New Light on Old Tales Today. Peterborough: Broadview Press, 1998. (A study of contemporary oral story-telling practices.)

---. "Fairy Tales for Adults: Walt Disney's Americanization of the Märchen." In Nikolai Burlakoff and Carl Lindahl, eds., Folklore on Two Continents: Essays in Honor of Linda Dégh. Bloomington: U of Indiana P, 1980. [UCCB]

---. "Feminist Approaches to the Interpretations of the Fairy Tales," in Bottigheimer, ed., Fairy Tales and Society.

---, "The Misuses of Enchantment: Controversies on the Significance of Fairy Tales," in Rosan A. Jordan and Susan J. Kalcik, eds., Women's Folklore, Women's Culture, Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1985. [UCCB]

---. "Things Walt Disney Never Told Us," in Claire Farrer, ed. Women and Folklore. Austin: University of Texas Press, 1975.

---. "Three Transformations of Snow White," in McGlatherty, et al., eds., The Brothers Grimm and the Folktale, 52-65.

Sutton, Martin. The Sin-complex: A Critical Study of English Versions of the Grimms' Kinder- und Hausmärchen in the Nineteenth Century. Kassel: Brüder Grimm-Gesellschaft, 1996. [ PT 921 S87 1996]

Sydow, Carl Wilhelm von. Selected Papers on Folklore. Ed Laurits Bødker. Copenhagen: Rosenkilde and Bagger, 1948. [UCCB] (A very important figure in the history of the scholarship. Devised the notions of "active" and "passive" bearers of traditional tales and also the idea of the "oicotype," which refers to that version of a tale tied to a particular region or place.)

Tatar, Maria. "From Nags to Witches: Stepmothers in the Grimms' Fairy Tales." Opening Texts: Psychoanalysis and the Culture of the Child. Ed. Joseph H. Smith and William Kerrigan. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1985. 28-41. [MSVU -- PN1009.A1O64 1985 and SMU -- RC 321 P943 v.8]

---. The Hard Facts of the Grimms' Fairy Tales. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1987. [PT 921 T38 1987] (An excellent introduction to ways of reading the tales that were collected and, to some degree, rewritten by the Grimm brothers. There is a revised edition, 2003 [On order at King's].)

---. Off with their Heads! Fairy Tales and the Culture of Childhood. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1992. [MSVU -- GR 550 T38 1992] (A well-written scholarly critique of ideas concerning the moral and educative function of the tales.)

Taylor, Archer. "The Biographical Pattern in Traditional Narrative." Journal of the Folklore Institute 1 (1964) 114-29. (Summarizes the hero legend as it is analysed in von Hahn, Rank, Raglan, Propp, and Campbell.)

Thelander, Dorothy R. "Mother Goose and Her Goslings: The France of Louis XIV as Seen through the Fairy Tale." Journal of Modern History 54 (1982): 467-96. (A study of the 17th-century historical background to the symbolic forms in the fairy tales of Perrault and others.) [Online at Dalhousie]

Thompson, Stith. The Folktale. New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1946; rpt. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1977. [PN 1001 T47] (Still a standard account of the folktale as a world phenomenon, with a fascinating account of different types of tales, characters, motifs, and other features.)

--- . Motif-index of Folk-literature: A Classification of Narrative Elements in Folktales, Ballads, Myths, Fables, Mediaeval Romances, Exempla, Fabliaux, Jest-books, and Local Legends. 6 vols. Bloomington: University of Indiana Press, 1955-8. [GR 67 T47 vols 1-6] (The master index of motifs, covering a huge range of texts from all over the world.)

Tolkien, J.R.R. "On Fairy-Stories." Tree and Leaf. London: Allen and Unwin, 1964. 9-73. [PN 3437 T6 1964] (Attempt at definition of the genre followed by comments on the supernatural, the fantastic, and other aspects of the tale. Tolkien was a philologist and literary historian as well as a novelist and his comments are the more interesting because of his double perspective. The essay was originally a lecture delivered in 1939.)

Tucker, Nicholas. "Fairy Tales and their Early Opponents: In Defence of Mrs Trimmer." In Mary Hilton, Morag Styles, and Victor Watson, eds. Opening the Nursery Door: Reading, Writing, and Childhood, 1600-1900. London & New York: Routledge, 1997. 104-16. [MSVU -- PR 990 O64 1997] (Brief study of the moralizing trend in the history of fairy tales.)

Wardetsky, Kristin. "The Structure and Interpretation of Fairy Tales Composed by Children." Journal of American Folklore 103 (1990): 157-76. [GR 1 J86]

Warner, Marina. From the Beast to the Blonde: On Fairy Tales and their Tellers. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1995. [GR 550 W38 1995] (Excellent as a wide-ranging popular account, but strangely disappointing if you are looking for a strong and sustained thesis based on scholarly research.)

Weber, Eugen. "Fairies and Hard Facts: The Reality of Folktales." Journal of the History of Ideas 42 (1981): 93-113. (A compelling thesis, often referred to, that you can find in the fairy tales evidence of the economic and social hardship of earlier times. See also the essay by Darnton.) [Online at Dalhousie]

Zipes, Jack. Breaking the Magic Spell: Radical Theories of Folk and Fairy Tales. Austin: University of Texas Press, 1979. [PN 3437 Z79 1979] (Readings of the tales that work to return them to history, politics, and the reality of everyday life. The chapters are 1 "Once there was a Time: An Introduction to the History and Ideology of Folk and Fairy Tales"; 2 "Might Makes Right -- The Politics of Folk and Fairy Tales"; 3 "The Revolutionary Rise of the Romantic Fairy Tale in Germany"; 4 "The Instrumentalization of Fantasy: Fairy Tales, the Culture Industry and Mass Media"; 5 "The Utopian Function of Fairy Tales and Fantasy: Ernst Bloch the Marxist and J.R.R. Tolkien the Catholic"; 6 "On the Use and Abuse of Folk and Fairy Tales with Children: Bruno Bettelheim's Moralistic Magic Wand")

---. The Brothers Grimm: From Enchanted Forests to the Modern World. New York & London: Routledge, 1988; rev. ed. 2003. [PD 63 Z57 2003] (Essays are: "Once There Were Two Brothers Named Grimm: A Reintroduction"; "Dreams of a Better Bourgeios Life: The Psycho-Social Origins of the Tales"; "Exploring Historical Paths"; "From Odysseus to Tom Thumb and Other Cunning Heroes: Speculations about the Entrepreneurial Spirit"; "The German Obsession with Fairy Tales"; "Henri Pourrat and the Tradition of Perrault and the Brothers Grimm"; "Recent Psychoanalytical Approaches with Some Questions about the Abuse of Children"; "Semantic Shifts of Power in Folk and Fairy Tales"; "Fairy Tale as Myth / Myth as Fairy Tale." Zipes has also translated the tales of the Grimm brothers.)

---. Don't Bet on the Prince: Contemporary Feminist Fairy Tales in North America and England. Aldershot: Gower, 1986. [PS 648 F4 D66 1986] (Has both examples of modern tales and some critical writing on fairy tales from a feminist perspective.)

---. Fairy Tale as Myth / Myth as Fairy Tale. Lexington, KY: University Press of Kentucky, 1994. [MSVU, MSU -- GR 550 Z56 1994] (A series of lectures: 1 "The Origins of the Fairy Tale"; 2 "Rumpelstiltskin and the Decline of Female Productivity"; 3 "Breaking the Disney Spell"; 4 "Spreading Myths about Iron John"; 5 "Oz as American Myth"; 6, "The Contemporary American Fairy Tale")

---. Fairy Tales and the Art of Subversion: The Classical Genre for Children and the Process of Civilization. New York: Wildman Press, 1983. [MSVU -- PN 3437 Z56 1988] (A series of linked essays: "Fairy Tale Discourse: Towards a Social History of the Genre"; "Setting Standards for Civilization through Fairy Tales: Charles Perrault and his Associates"; "Who's Afraid of the Brothers Grimm? Socialization and Politicization through Fairy Tales"; "Hans Christian Andersen and the Discourse of the Dominated"; "Inverting and Subverting the World with Hope: The Fairy Tales of George MacDonald, Oscar Wilde and L. Frank Baum"; "The Fight over Fairy-Tale Discourse: Family, Friction, and Socialization in the Weimar Republic and Nazi German"; "The Liberating Potential of the Fantastic in Contemporary Fairy Tales for Children")

---. Happily Ever After: Fairy Tales, Children, and the Culture Industry. New York: Routledge, 1997. [MSVU -- GR 550 Z58 1997] ("Of Cats and Men: Framing the Civilizing Discourse of the Fairy Tale"; "The Rationalization of Abandonment and Abuse in Fairy Tales: The Case of Hansel and Gretel"; "Toward a Theory of the Fairy-Tale Film: The Case of Pinocchio"; "Once upon a Time beyond Disney: Contemporary Fairy-Tale Films for Children"; "Lion Kings and the Culture Industry"; "Revisiting Benjamin's 'The Storyteller': Reviving the Past to Move Forward")

---. The Oxford Companion to Fairy Tales: The Western Tradition from Medieval to Modern. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000. [MSVU (non-circulating)]

---. The Trials and Tribulations of Little Red Riding Hood. 2nd ed. New York and London: Routledge, 1993. [GR 75 L56 Z56 1993] (Zipes' article on the visual imagery of the story, "A Second Gaze at Little Red Riding Hood's Trials and Tribulations," is reprinted in his Don't Bet on the Prince, pp. 226-60. See also Dundes, above.)

---. When Dreams Come True: Classical Fairy Tales and Their Tradition. New York: Routledge, 1999. [MSVU -- PN 3437 Z57 1999] (Contains previously published introductions to a number of collections that Zipes edited: "Spells of Enchantment: An Overview of the History of Fairy Tales"; "The Rise of the French Fairy Tale and the Decline of France"; "The Splendour of the Arabian Nights"; "Once There Were Two Brothers Named Grimm"; "Hans Christian Andersen and the Discourse of the Dominated"; "The Flowering of the Fairy Tale in Victorian England"; "Oscar Wilde's Tales of Illumination"; "Carlo Collodi's Pinocchio as Tragi-Comic Fairy Tale"; Frank Stockton, American Pioneer of Fairy Tales"; "L. Frank Baum and the Utopian Spirit of Oz"; "Hermann Hesse's Fairy Tales and the Pursuit of Home")