fairy tale
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fairy tale, wonder tale involving marvellous elements and occurrences, though not necessarily about fairies. The term embraces such popular folktales (Märchen, q.v.) as “Cinderella” and “Puss-in-Boots” and art fairy tales (Kunstmärchen) of later invention, such as The Happy Prince (1888), by the Irish writer Oscar Wilde. It is often difficult to distinguish between tales of literary and oral origin, because folktales have received literary treatment from early times, and, conversely, literary tales have found their way back into the oral tradition. Early Italian collections such as Le piacevoli notti (1550, vol. 1; 1553, vol. 2; “The Pleasant Nights”) of Gianfrancesco Straparola and Il Pentamerone (1636; originally published [1634] in Neapolitan dialect as Lo cunto de li cunti) of Giambattista Basile contain reworkings in a highly literary style of such stories as “Snow White,” “Sleeping Beauty,” and “The Maiden in the Tower.” A later French collection, Charles Perrault’s Contes de ma mère l’oye (1697; Tales of Mother Goose), including “Cinderella,” “Little Red Ridinghood,” and “Beauty and the Beast,” remains faithful to the oral tradition, while the Kinder- und Hausmärchen (1812–15; “Children’s and Household Tales,” generally known as Grimm’s Fairy Tales) of the Brothers Grimm are transcribed directly from oral renderings (although often from literate informants). The influence of Perrault and the Grimms has been very great, and their versions have been commonly adopted as nursery tales among literate people in the West. For example, Grimm’s “Rumpelstiltskin” has replaced the native English “Tom Tit Tot,” and Perrault’s “Cinderella” has replaced “Cap o’ Rushes,” once almost equally popular in oral tradition.
Art fairy tales were cultivated in the period of German Romanticism by Goethe, Ludwig Tieck, Clemens Brentano, and E.T.A. Hoffmann and in Victorian England by John Ruskin (The King of the Golden River, 1851) and Charles Kingsley (The Water-Babies, 1863), but few of these tales have found permanent popularity. The master of the art fairy tale, whose works rank with the traditional stories in universal popularity, is the Danish writer Hans Christian Andersen. Though his stories have their roots in folk legend, they are personal in style and contain elements of autobiography and contemporary social satire.
Twentieth-century psychologists, notably Sigmund Freud, Carl Jung, and Bruno Bettelheim, have interpreted elements of the fairy tale as manifestations of universal fears and desires. In his Uses of Enchantment (1976), Bettelheim asserted that the apparently cruel and arbitrary nature of many folk fairy stories is actually an instructive reflection of the child’s natural and necessary “killing off” of successive phases of development and initiation.