Introduction

Abstract

Introduction Christina Moustakis In Shakespeare's As You Like It Le Beau observes to Celia that "There comes an old man, and his three sons"; and the lady replies, "I could match this beginning with an old tale." Not all old tales have seemed so innocuous: in King Lear there comes an old man, and his three daughters . . . and in 1681 Nahum Tate, profoundly disturbed by the end of the tale, rewrote Shakespeare not only to allow Lear to live but also to contrive a marriage between Edgar and Cordelia, in this way producing a version that displaced the original from the English stage for a century and a half. We now see Shakespeare's Lear on stage, and for the most part we now read versions of the old tales that are free of the bowdlerizations of the likes of Sarah Trimmer, George Cruickshank, and Walt Disney. Except in certain quarters (the 1981 MLA panel "Children's Literature: Target for Censorship in the 1980s" reported that there is a disturbing rise in the censoring of children's literature by various groups purporting to protect children's sensibilities, rights, etc.), the battles seem past, the fairy tale emerging victorious and in splendid health, still capable of artistic transmutation, as in the versions of "Snow White" by Robert Coover, Donald Barthleme, Anne Sexton, and Louise Bogan. We now have time to take the measure of our whereabouts, to begin to assess what has been done and to see what needs doing. What follows is an introduction to the present state of research inspired by fairy tales. Roderick McGillis begins with a two-part piece: the first is a brief review of recent criticism of fairy tales; the second "argues for the phenomenological unity of the tales and explains their liberating potential." Perry Nodelman offers a strategy for engaging adults in a study of fairy tales—adults who often feel that children's literature is the "ultimate Mickey Mouse course." Patricia Miller and Anita Moss examine the influence that fairy tales had on several nineteenth-century writers, and Ruth MacDonald considers the effects that the modern feminists have had on newly-invented fairy tales and on re-tellings of older ones. Janet Spaeth discovers significant meaning in the housekeeping tasks that beset maidens in many of the tales from the Grimm brothers. Jack Zipes, looking closely at the work of Mme. Leprince de Beaumont, proposes that "we have reached a point in scholarly research where a thorough historical study is warranted." The editor offers some observations on violence, particularly the illustrations of violence, and Maria Tatar, employing the binary structures of myth and of Russian formalism, looks at the disruptive forces in the home that propel the hero into the larger world outside, a world where the trouble at home is mirrored and writ large. Lois Kuznets and Joyce Thomas discuss some books that offer a variety of approaches to the study of fairy tales. The range of contributions in this edition confirms that the fairy tale is alive and well, and that it flourishes not only in the nursery but also in the studies of those for whom enchantment has become, one hopes with no diminution of wonder, a scholarly discipline. Copyright © 1982 Children's Literature Association