Reading Highlights

The following may not cover all of the assigned readings for the lesson. Always be sure to check your syllabus schedule for reading specifics.

Maria Tatar -- Little Red Riding Hood

We each shared the version of Little Red Riding Hood we recalled from memory in the first lesson, and in this lesson we will be reading different versions and variants of the same tale. Tatar's The Classic Fairy Tales includes eight different versions and Tatar's introduction gives a great overview of the history and evolvement of this type AT 333 tales. In the next lesson we will discuss a bit more about tale types, but for now just know that Little Red Riding Hood is classified by folklorists as being of tale type 333. You can also find some more versions in D. L. Ashliman's Web site (http://www.pitt.edu/~dash/type0333.html).

When you read the tales, note the similarities as well as differences between these versions and identify which one might be the source of your retelling last week. The appearance of the picturebook form also adds to the variation of the tale. Although artists' pictorial interpretation of tales is not the main focus of this course, you are encouraged to find and read as many different versions in illustrated form as possible. The SurLaLune Web site has a thorough bibliography of Little Red Riding Hood picture books that are still in print today (http://www.surlalunefairytales.com/ridinghood/books.html ). Click the image of a book cover and you will be linked to more information about the book, which might help you to find copies owned by your local library or bookstore. Pay special attention to

Pat McKissack & Rachel Isadora's Flossie and the Fox (http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0803702507/thesurlalufairyt/103-4671889-1251042), and
Ed Young's Lon Po Po (http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0399216197/thesurlalufairyt/103-4236598-2920645).

The African-American tale and the Chinese variant are similar to the early European recording, The Story of Grandmother, in the way that the young girl (or girls) in the story is shrewd and outfoxes the wolf (or fox) and escapes successfully, as opposed to the seemingly stupid and naïve girl in Perrault's and Brothers Grimm's versions.

Hugh Crago

The Australian psychologist Crago's essay What Is a Fairy Tale in the last issue of the UK children's literature journal Signal does a nice job of setting out the groundwork and raising some important issues. He clarifies some common misconceptions about fairy tales and gives a nice overview on some scholars' ideas, including the taxonomic, psychoanalytic, historical views and most interestingly an exploration of associating fairy tales with children from several perspectives. Finally he defines fairy tale as "a narrative form which represents a society's collective concerns with some aspect of 'growing up,' and it explores these concerns at the level of magical thought."

Marina Warner

In this excerpt from a chapter of Warner's book From the Beast to the Blonde, she gives credits to women storytellers and creators and reclaims that the sources behind some popular collectors, such as Perrault and Brothers Grimm, were often women relatives and acquaintances. She also deconstructs the terms "fairy tale" and "old wives' tale" which carry negative connotations and attempts to reinterpret and give new meanings to them.

Robert Darnton

Darnton's Peasants Tell Tales: The Meaning of Mother Goose criticizes the psychoanalysis way of interpreting fairy tales, which is based on a single version of a single tale and fails to recognize the historical and contextual factors of folklore. Although the article focuses more on the traditional French tales, Darnton offers a good account of how folklorists understand early peasant mentalities and look at the tendencies and patterns in a collection of tales within one culture and compare the styles and structures of similar types of tales across cultures. Many tales discussed in this article can be found online, for example,

The Wolf and the Seven Kids can be read at this Web site:
http://fairytales4u.com/story3/sevenkids.htm

Several of Perrault's tales are in full text at these two Web sites:
http://www.pitt.edu/~dash/perrault.html

http://www.angelfire.com/nb/classillus/images/perrault/perra.html

Jack Zipes

Zipes is best known as a cultural critic and he frequently brings a sociological or social history point of view to folk and fairy tales. This essay, Once There Was a Time, is an early one in Zipes" career and he sets out his framework for understanding folk tales. Zipes concentrates on class issues, the lower classes from which the stories originated and the middle and ruling classes who later appropriated the stories and massaged them into promoting ruling class values and sentiments. We will be encountering Zipes throughout this course, so spend a little time with this essay and please ask questions if you are confused.