Course Schedule

Please note that the readings are a work in progress, with additions and subtractions throughout the semester.

*You may access the “Print Schedule” buttons at the bottom of the page.

Week 1: (29/31 August)

29 August

• Syllabus

31 August: Introduction & The Meaning of the Fairy Tale

• How to Read a Fairy Tale (Christine Jones and Jennifer Schacker)

• Why a New History of Fairy Tales? (Ruth Bottingheimer)

Week 2: (5/7 September)

7 September: Tales Told Around the Fire – the Oral Folk Tradition

• Primary Texts:
  • Skim: Sir James G. Frazer, The Golden Bough
  • Lucius Apuleius “Cupid and Psyche”
  • The Tiger Grandmother (there is text under the pasted pages)
  • The Sparrow and the Crow
• Critical Approaches:
  • The Cultural Evolution of Storytelling and Fairy Tales: Human Communication and Memetics (Jack Zipes)
  • The Phylogeny of Little Red Riding Hood (Jamshid J. Tehrani)
  • Fairytale in the Ancient World (Online Access), Introduction (Graham Anderson)
    • Google Books (missing a page)
  • Roderick Beaton, “The Oral Traditions of Modern Greece“
• Supplemental Readings:
  • The Folktale, 1978 (Stith Thompson)
  • Oral Tradition and History (Robert Lowie)
  • Ground Myths
  • Brewster, Paul 1996: “The Foundation Sacrifice Motif in Legend, Folksong, Game, and Dance”, The Walled-up Wife. A Casebook. Alan Dundes (ed). Madison: The University of Wisconsin Press, pp. 35-62.

Make sure your Twitter username is listed in the Homework Space.

Week 3: (12/14 September) 

12 September: The Characteristics of Tales and Their Anthologies

• Primary Texts:
  • Tatar, Beauty and the Beast
  • Siddhi-Kür
• Critical Approaches:
  • “Rewritten by Adults” (Maria Tatar)
  • “The Sorcerer’s Apprentice, Harry Potter, and Why Magic Matters,” p. 1-12
  • “Oral Genres as a Bridge to Written Literature” (Francis Lee Utley)
• Supplemental Readings
  • Propp’s Structure of the Magic Tale – Outline of the classical work “Morphology of the Folktale.
  • Hans-Jörg Uther in The Types of International Folktales
  • “On Fairy Tales and Their Anthologies” (Christine Jones and Jennifer Schacker)

Homework due on 12 September:

• A copy of your mind map on ONE of your three selected ideas for the final project.
  • Please include the TWO other ideas that you did not choose to mind map with your submission.

14 September: Historical Approaches

• Primary Texts:
  • Little Red Riding Hood (Delarue, Perrault, Grimms), Sleeping Beauty (Basile, Perrault, Grimms)
  • Basile, Giambattista. The Pentamerone, or The Story of Stories. John Edward Taylor, translator. London: David Bogue, 1850 (Sun, Moon, and Talia, plus 2 of your choice)
• Critical Approaches:
  • Peasants Tell Tales: The Meaning of Mother Goose (Robert Darnton)
  • “Silenced Women in the Grimms’ Tales” (Ruth Bottigheimer)
  • Jack Zipes, “Fairy Tale Discourse” Toward Social History & Genre”
• Supplemental Readings
  • Jack Zipes, “The Origins of the Fairy Tale in Italy“
  • Nancy Canepa, Out of the Woods: The Origins of the Literary Fairy Tale in Italy and France
  • Stith Thompson, The Folktale (1978)

Week 4: (19/21 September)

19 September: French Fairy Tales

• Primary texts:
  • “The Story of Grandmother”
  • Charles Perrault, “Cinderella,” Review: his “Little Red Riding Hood” and  “Sleeping Beauty”
  • Marie-Catherine d’Aulnoy, “Finette Cendron”
  • Marie-Catherine d’Aulnoy, “The Ram” and “The White Cat”
  • Jeanne-Marie Leprince de Beaumont, “Beauty and the Beast” (
• Critical approaches:
  • Thinking Through Things: Magical Objects, Power, and Agency in French Fairy Tales. Marvels & Tales
  • Simulating Oralities: French Fairy Tales of the 1690s
  • Jack Zipes, “Setting Standards for Civilization through Fairy Tales: Charles Perrault and the Subversive Role of Women Writers”
• Supplemental readings and resources:
  • Refraining the Early French Fairy Tale: A Selected Bibliography
  • Elizabeth Wanning Harries, Twice Upon a Time: Women Writers and the History of the Fairy Tale (2003)
  • Jack Zipes, Beauties, Beasts and Enchantments: Classic French Fairy Tales (2009)
  • Stedman, A.PROLEPTIC SUBVERSION: LONGING FOR THE MIDDLE AGES IN THE LATE SEVENTEENTH-CENTURY FRENCH FAIRY TALE. Romanic review. (05/01/2008) ,  99
  • Cristina Bacchilega, “Fairy Tales and the Ideology of Gender” (MT, 509-513)
  • Anne Duggan, “Ideology and the Importance of Socio-Political and Gender Contexts” (MT, 518-522)
  • Sophie Raynard, “Sexuality and the Women Fairy Tale Writers of the 1690s” (MT, 551-54)

21 September:  The Brothers Grimm

• Primary texts:
  • Grimms selected tales, The Original Folk & Fairy Tales of the Brothers Grimm: “The Frog King, or Iron Henry,” “Rapunzel,”  “Hansel and Gretel,”  “Cinderella,” “How Some Children Played at Slaughtering” , “Mother Holle” , “Little Red Cap” , “Godfather Death” , “The Juniper Tree” , “Little Snow White” , “The Summer and Winter Garden” , “The Singing, Springing Lark” , “The Raven” , “The Worn Out Dancing Shoes”

• Critical approaches:
  • Jack Zipes, “Who’s Afraid of the Brothers Grimm? Socialization and Politicization through Fairy Tales”
  • Grimm’s “Household Tales” and Its Place in the Household: The Social Relevance of a Controversial Classic
  • Grimms’ Tales around the Globe: The Dynamics of Their International Reception: Introduction (feel free to skim other chapters)

• Supplemental readings and resources:
  • Maria Tatar, The Hard Facts of the Grimms’ Fairy Tales (2003)
  • Ruth Bottigheimer, Grimms’ Bad Girls and Bold Boys: The Moral and Social Vision of the Tales (1989)
  • Alan Dundes, “The Motif-Index and the Tale Type Index: A Critique”
  • Torborg Lundell, “Folktale Heroines and the Type and Motif Indexes”
  • Hans-Jörg Uther, The Types of International Folktales, Introduction, Examples
  • Vladimir Propp, Morphology of the Folktale, ch I, II (3-24, plus assorted materials)
  • “Tale Type” and “Motif” from Greenwood Encyclopedia of Folk and Fairy Tales 
  • Bengt Holbek, “The Language of Fairy Tales”
  • Jack Zipes, “Rediscovering the Original Tales of the Brothers Grimm”
  • “You Have to Kiss a Lot of Frogs (Toads) Before You Meet Your Handsome Prince”: From Fairy-Tale Motif to Modern Proverb

A copy of your Research Proposal for your final project is due in class. (This accounts for 5% of your final project grade). What are you studying? Why? What do you hope to understand?

Week 5: (26/28 September)

26 September: The Great Collectors

• Critical Approaches:
  • Please visit the website below, which organizes the stories collected by Andrew Lang in categories of origin: http://www.mythfolklore.net/andrewlang/indexbib.htm. Browse through the tales, and take note of the sources.
    • The Story of Dschemil and Dschemila (African)
      East of the Sun and West of the Moon (Norwegian)
      The Turtle and His Bride (Native American)
      The Slaying of the Tanuki (Japan)
      The Wonderful Birch (Russian)What motifs/structures which are similar to the Western European tales we’ve read. Pay close attention to the mix of “native” and “adapted” elements in the tales.
  • Hans Christian Andersen, “The Tinderbox,” “The Princess and the Pea,” and “The Red Shoes”
  • Peter Chisten Asbjorsen and Jorgen Engebretsen Moe, “East o’the Sun and West o’the Moon,” “Tatterhood,” and “Little Annie the Goose Girl”
  • Aleksandr Afanas’ev, “The Frog Princess”t
• Primary texts: (Focus on assigned collection)
  • Donald Haase, “Response and Responsibility in Reading Grimms’ Fairy Tales”
• Supplemental readings and resources:
  • Marina Warner, From the Beast to the Blonde: On Fairy Tales and Their Tellers
  • Kirin Narayan, Mondays on the Dark Night of the Moon: Himalayan Foothill Folktales
  • William Bernard McCarthy, Jack in Two Worlds: Contemporary North American Tales and Their Tellers
  • “The Brothers Grimm as Collectors and Editors of German Folktales” (Siegfried Neumann)
  • Henry Glassie, “Authorship in Oral Narrative”

3 October: The Cross-Cultural Cinderella

• Primary Texts:
  • Tatar: Cinderella
• Critical Approaches:
  • Cinderella: The People’s Princess (Ruth Bottigheimer)
  • Cinderella as a Case Study (Talitha Verhij)
  • The Secret Life of … Cinderella (Simon Heywood)
• Supplemental Readings:
  • Cinderella (Armenian)
  • Mi’kmaq Indian Cinderella tells the Native American Myth in detail.
  • Cinderella (Bulgarian) *
  • Cinderella: or Aschenputtel (German) *
  • Cinderella (Greek)
  • Cinderella (Italian) *
  • Cinderella; or, The Little Glass Slipper (French) *
  • Katie Woodencloak (Norway)

Week 6: (3/5 October)

5 October: Witch as Fairy, Fairy as Witch 

• Primary texts:
  • Baba Yaga
  • Quiller–Couch, Arthur. “Thomas the Rhymer.” The Oxford Book of Ballads, 1910.
  • Child, Francis James. “Tam Lin: 39A.” The English and Scottish Popular Ballads, 1882–1898.
• Critical Approaches:
  • Warner, Chapter 2
  • Of Diana, Witches, and Fairies
  • The Woman as Witch
• Supplemental Readings:
  • The Mingling of Fairy and Witch Beliefs in Sixteenth and Seventeenth Century Scotland
  • When Witches Communed With Fairies – Carolyn Emerick

Week 7: (10/12 October) Discussion for both 10/12 will be on 12 October

10 October: Queer & Feminist Approaches

• Primary texts:
  • Tatar, 364-373
  • Perrault, “Donkeyskin”
  • Grimms, “Hansel and Gretel” (vol 15), “Maiden without Hands,” (vol 31), “Fitcher’s Bird” (vol 46), “All Fur” (vol 65)
  • Basile, “The Maiden Without Hands”

• Critical Approaches:
  • An Introduction to the ‘Innocent Persecuted Heroine’ Fairy Tale (Cristina Bacchilega)
  • “Once Upon a Queer Time” (Pauline Greenhill and Kay Turner)
  • “Playing with Fire: Transgression as Truth in Grimms’ ‘Frau Trude’” (Kay Turner)
  • “Sorting Out the Donkey Skin (ATU 510B): Toward and Integrative Literal-Symbolic Analysis of Fairy Tales” (Jeana Jorgensen)

• Supplemental Readings:
  • “Feminist Fairy Tale Scholarship” (Donald Haase)
  • Fairy Tales & Feminism: New Approaches, 2004 (Donald Haase)
  • “Demon Lovers” and “The Ogre’s Appetite” (Marina Warner)
  • “The Rationalization of Abandonment and the Abuse in Fairy Tales: The Case of Hansel and Gretel” (Jack Zipes)
  • “Donkeyskin, Deerskin, Allerleirauh, The Reality of the Fairy Tale” (Helen Pilinovsky)
  • “The True (False) Bride and the False (True) Bridegroom: ‘Fitcher’s Bird’ and Gendered Virtue & Villainy” (Catherine Tosenberger)

12 October: Psychoanalytic & Marxist Approaches

• Primary Texts:
  • Tatar, Snow White

• Critical Approaches:
  • “The Instrumentalization of Fantasy: Fairy Tales, the Culture Industry, and the Mass Media” (Jack Zipes) | pages 104-124; 127-129; 137-145
  • Carl Jung and Mythology
  • Bruno Bettelheim, Excerpts
• Supplemental Readings:
  • Children need fairy tales
  • Bruno Bettelheim, Introduction
  • “The Psychoanalytic Study of the Grimms’ Tales: The Maiden Without Hands” (Alan Dundes)

Week 8: (19 October)

19 October: Remaking Bluebeard

• Primary Texts:
  • Grimms, Bluebeard
  • Perrault, Bluebeard
  • Tatar, Bluebeard
• Critical Approaches
  • Warner, “Bluebeard’s Brides: The Dream of the Blue Chamber”
  • Foucault, Power/Knowledge
  • Joseph Rouse
  • Bluebeard and its multiple layers of meaning

• Supplemental Readings:
  • Joseph Rouse  -explains Power/Knowledge
  • Modern interpretations of Bluebeard
  • Zipes, Remaking “Bluebeard,” or Good-bye to Perrault (missing pages online)

Annotated Bibliography and Historiographic State of the Field Essay due in class

Week 9: (24/26 October)

24 October: FILM

26 October: No Class

Week 10: (31 October/2 November)

2 November: Orientalism Continued

Week 11:   (7/9 November)

7 November: Cultural Politics & The Transformation of the Fairy Tale

• Primary Texts:
  • “Wolfland” (Tanith Lee) – Ignore the discussion questions.
  • Once Upon A Time: Red-Handed – Watch Season 1 Episode 15
  • by Nikolai Leskov, translated by Alfred Edward Chamot, The Lady Macbeth of the Mzinsk District
• Critical Approaches:
  • Jack Zipes, “Breaking the Magic Spell: Politics and the Fairy Tale“
  • Kay Stone, “Things Walt Disney Never Told Us“
  • Walter Benjamin, “The Storyteller“
• Supplemental Readings
  • Sharon Downey, Feminine Empowerment in Disney’s Beauty and the Beast
  • Zipes, “The Instrumentalization of Fantasy“
  • Reviewed Work: The Uses of Enchantment: The Meaning and Importance of Fairy Tales by Bruno Bettelheim

• Potential Screening: Red Riding Hood (2011) – IMDb

9 November: Postmodern Fairy Tales

• Primary Texts:
  • Angela Carter, The Bloody Chamber
  • Anne Sexton, “Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs”
  • Grimms, “Briar Rose”
  • Basile, “Sun, Moon, and Talia” (reread)

• Critical Approaches:
  • Cathy Lynn Preston, “Disrupting the Boundaries of Genre and Gender. Postmodernism in FairyTale“
  • Sarah Gamble, Penetrating to the Heart of the Bloody Chamber: Angela Carter and the Fairy Tale
  • Kimberly J. Lau, “A Desire for Death: The Grimms’ Sleeping Beauty in The Bloody Chamber”
• Supplemental Readings:
  • Jessica Tiffin, “The Bloodied Text: Angela Carter.” Marvelous Geometry
  • Maria Nikolajeva, “Fairy Tale and Fantasy: From Archaic to Postmodern” (Canvas)
  • Kimberly J. Lau, Erotic Infidelities: Love and Enchantment in Angela Carter’s The Bloody Chamber (2014)
  • Cristina Bacchilega, Postmodern Fairy Tales: Gender and Narrative Strategy (1999)

Week 12: (14/16 November)

14 November: Individual Projects

16 November: Film & TV (Disney, Digital, & Beyond)

• Primary Texts:
  • Fairy Tales & TV: A Database (fairtytales.byu.edu)
  • The International Fairy-Tale Filmography website (iftf.uwinnipeg.ca)
• Critical Approaches:
  • Jessica Tiffin: Magical Illusion: Fairy-Tale Film
  • Cristina Bacchilega: Mixing It Up: Generic Complexity and Gender Ideology in Early Twenty-First Century Fairy Tale Films – Chapter 1 in Fairy Tale Films
  • Pauline Greenhill and Jill Rudy, Channeling Wonder: Fairy Tales, Television, and Intermediality (2014)
• Supplemental Readings:
  • Jack Zipes, The Liberating Potential of the Fantastic Projection in Fairy Tales for Children
  • Jack Zipes: Walt Disney’s Civilizing Mission: From Revolution to Restoration
  • Pauline Greenhill and Sidney Eve Matrix, Fairy Tale Films: Visions of Ambiguity
  • Cristina Bacchilega: Fairy Tales Transformed? Twenty-first Century Adaptations and the Politics of Wonder (2013)
  • Jeana Jorgensen: The Black and White Bride: Dualism, Gender, and Bodies in European Fairy Tales.
  • Susan Cahill: Through the Looking Glass: Fairy-Tale Cinema and the Spectacle of Femininity in “Stardust” and “The Brothers Grimm”

Secondary Source Analysis is due:

• A hard copy of your secondary source analysis is due at the start of class.

21 November:Transformations and Transgressions

• Primary Texts:
  • Emma Donoghue, Kissing the Witch * free with Audible Trial on Amazon
  • Kelly Link, “Swans“
  • Grimms: The Twelve Brothers, Cinderella, The Seven Ravens, The Six Swans
  • Schonwerth: The Turnip Princess and Other Newly Discovered Fairy Tales * free with Audible Trial on Amazon
• Critical Approaches:
  • Kay Turner and Pauline Greenhill: “Once Upon a Queer Time”
  • Jennifer Orme, “Mouth to Mouth: Queer Desire in Emma Donoghue’s Kissing the Witch” 
  • Jeana Jorgensen, “Queering Kinship in ‘The Maiden Who Seeks Her Brothers'”
• Supplemental Readings:
  • Neil Gaiman, “Snow Glass Apples”
  • Tanith Lee, “When the Clock Strikes”
  • Kay Turner and Pauline Greenhill Transgressive Tales: Queering the Grimms

Week 13: (21 November)

Thanksgiving Break: No class 23 November

Week 14: (28/30 November)

28 November: Mashups, Material Culture, & Comics

• Primary Texts:
  • Bill Willingham, 1001 Nights of Snowfall 
  • VIEW: Goldstein, “Fallen Princesses”

• Critical Approaches:
  • Cristina Bacchilega, “Resituating the Arabian Nights: Challenges and Promises of Translations“
  • Daniel Peretti, “Comics as Folklore“
• Supplemental Readings: 
  • Bill Ellis, “Fairy Tales as Metacommentary in Manga and Anime”
  • Martin Hallet and Barbara Karasek, “Illustration”

30 November: FILM

Week 15: (5/7 December)

5 December: Little Red Riding Hood Goes to Hollywood

• Primary Texts:
  • Mad Men clip
  • A Game of Thrones Fairytale: The Trailer
  • Grimm – Black Claw Gets the Upper Hand
• Critical Approaches:
  • Preston Wittwer, Don Draper Thinks Your Ad Is Cliché: Fairy Tale Iconography in TV Commercials
  • Juliana Lindsay, The Magic and Science of Grimm: A Television Fairy Tale for Modern Americans
  • Anne Kustritz, ““They All Lived Happily Ever After. Obviously.”
• Supplemental Readings:
  • Stefan Morrone. “How Game of Thrones Teaches Us about the Syrian Refugee Crisis.”

7 December: FILM

 

Final Exam: Completed Timeline/StoryMap Project Due by 6:00 pm on 14 December