fairy stories

fairy stories have existed in the oral tradition of all cultures, but entered the mainstream as a distinct literary genre with the publication of the stories of the French writer Charles Perrault (1628–1703), written for a fashionable and sophisticated adult salon audience. Many earlier literary works (including those of Chaucer, Boccaccio, Malory, Straparola, and Giambattista Basile) had featured fairies and tales of the supernatural, but it was in the last two decades of the 17th cent. that a new vogue for the written fairy tale was established.

The translation of story collections from other cultures reinforced the popularity of the fairy story: the Fables of Bidpai had reached England from the Arabic in T. North's version of 1570, and were republished in French in 1697. The Arabian Nights in French (1704) and English (c.1708) had an immense influence on the Oriental tale and the development of the novel. During the 18th cent. fairy stories flourished, despite protests from some educationalists that they were unwholesome and immoral. In the 19th cent., historians of folklore, notably the brothers Grimm, made the fairy story a respectable subject for academic research, and from 1823 many new tales were introduced to the British canon: at the same period T. C. Croker was making an important collection of Irish folk tales, and Hans Andersen's stories were appearing in Danish. The northern and Nordic theme continued with the retelling of Norse myths by Annie and Eliza Keary (The Heroes of Asgard, 1857) and Sir G. Dasent (Popular Tales from the Norse, 1859). Andrew Lang made important collections from many sources, and produced from 1889 his own very popular Fairy Books. Sir John Rhŷs collected stories in Celtic Folklore, Welsh and Manx (1901, repr. 1980). Rackham's illustrations of Grimm, Barrie, and others contributed to the genre in its heyday before the First World War: Barrie's Peter Pan proved one of the most enduring.

The 20th cent. witnessed the rise of psychoanalytic and anthropological studies of legend, myth and fairy story, by Freud, Jung, Frazer, and others, and produced Bruno Bettelheim's classic work, The Uses of Enchantment: The Power and Importance of Fairy Tales (1978), which argues that stories offer children a valuable tool for psychological growth and adjustment. Other notable surveys include M. Duffy's The Erotic World of Faery (1972), and M. Warner's From the Beast to the Blonde (1994), which emphasises the subversive elements in fairy tales, and discusses the tradition of female transmission of them: she also considers the contribution of the Walt Disney film and its images of female heroism. American poet Robert Bly offered a reading of a Grimm story in his Iron John (1990), which stresses the importance of the masculine principle and male ritual.

The late 20th cent. saw a notable revival of interest in the adult fairy tale, as authors freed themselves from the constraints of realism to explore the world through myth and fantasy: Byatt, Angela Carter, Calvino, Michèle Roberts, and Rushdie have all used the genre to remarkable effect.