If there is one ‘constant’ in the structure and theme of the wonder tale, it is transformation.

Everything beautiful is golden and strewn with pearls. Even golden people live here. But misfortune is a dark power, a monstrous, cannibalistic giant, who is, however, vanquished, because a good woman, who happily knows how...

As the literary fairy tale spread in France to every age group and every social class, it began to serve different functions, depending on the writer’s interests. It represented the glory and ideology of the...

It was only as part of the civilizing process that storytelling developed within the aristocratic and bourgeois homes, in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries through governesses and nannies, and later in the eighteenth and the...

The very name of the genre itself – fairy tale – originated during this time, for the French writers coined the term conte de fee during the seventeenth century, and it has stuck to the...

The literary fairy tale became an acceptable social symbolic form through which conventionalized motifs, characters, and plots were selected, composed, arranged, and rearranged to comment on the civilizing process and to keep alive the possibility...

It has generally been assumed that fairy tales were first created for children and are largely the domain of children. But nothing could be further from the truth.From the very beginning, thousands of years ago,...

a means to conquer the terrors of mankind through metaphor.

Rarely do wonder tales end unhappily. They triumph over death. The tale begins with “Once upon a time” or “Once there was” and never really ends when it ends. The ending is actually the beginning....

Fairy tales begin with conflict because we all begin our lives with conflict. We are all misfit for the world, and somehow we must fit in, fit in with other people, and thus we must...

Since these wonder tales have been with us for thousands of years and have undergone so many different changes in the oral tradition, it is difficult to determine the ideological intention of the narrator, and...

The fairy tale emanates from specific struggles to humanize bestial and barbaric forces, which have terrorized our minds and communities in concrete ways, threatening to destroy free will and human compassion. The fairy tale sets...

Ultimately, the definition of both the wonder tale and the fairy tale, which derives from it, depends on the manner in which a narrator/author arranges known functions of a tale aesthetically and ideologically to induce...

Inevitably they find their way into the forest. It is there that they lose and find themselves. It is there that they gain a sense of what is to be done. The forest is always...