Little Red Riding Hood: A Casebook

Little Red Riding Hood: A Casebook edited by Alan Dundes is another excellent book for gathering opinions and studies on Little Red Riding Hood. It contains both tales and articles.

Description from the publisher:

Alan Dundes continues his exploration of well-loved fairy tales with this casebook on one of the best-known of them all: Little Red Riding Hood.

Following versions of the tale by Perrault and the Brothers Grimm, the essays by an international group of scholars provide an impressive cross-section of theoretical approaches.

"Alan Dundes, the prominent psychoanalytical folklorist, offers another tour de force to entertain and educate the scholarly and the lay readership remembering their childhood fascination with bedtime stories. . . . He prefaces each [essay] with superbly informed, insightful, critical commentaries. At the end, Dundes summarizes the results of the interpretations he selected from an astoundingly rich literature, with a survey of Little Red Riding Hood scholarship and his own psychoanalytical decoding of the tale."—Linda Dégh, History of Education Quarterly

"This valuable volume admirably succeeds in its purpose of providing a wide range of historical and interpretive readings that illuminate this most popular of folktales from a number of perspectives. . . . The essays vary in content from several significant contemporary psychoanalytic and feminist critiques by Bruno Bettelheim, Jack Zipes, and Dundes himself to more fanciful pieces on the mythological interpretation of the tale. The book also provides a cross-cultural perspective, which includes the traditional folk-narrative approach of comparing tale variants and analyzing separate motifs for their sociomythical foundations, and a contemporary political analysis."—Choice

"The collection is illuminating and entertaining and could well change one's attitude toward the little girl in the red cap."—Steven Swann Jones, American Anthropologist

Alan Dundes (1934–2005), was professor of anthropology and folklore at the University of California, Berkeley, and published ten books with the University of Wisconsin Press, including Oedipus, Folk Law, The Cockfight, The Wisdom of Many, The Evil Eye, Little Red Riding Hood, Cinderella, and The Blood Libel Legend. He is also the author of Parsing through Customs.

Table of Contents:

Acknowledgments

Introduction

Little Red Riding Hood by Charles Perrault

Little Red Cap (Rotkäppchen) by Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm

The Story of Grandmother by Paul Delarue

The Story of Grandaunt Tiger by Wolfram Eberhard

Is “Little Red Riding Hood” a Myth? by Georg Hüsing

Little Red Riding Hood or The Little May Queen by P. Saintyves [E. Nourry]

Is Little Red Riding Hood Wearing a Liberty Cap? On Presumable Connotations in Tieck and in Grimm by Hans-Wolf Jager

“Little Red Riding Hood” as Male Creation and Projection by Jack Zipes

The Concept of Childhood and Children’s Folktales: Test Case—”Little Red Riding Hood” by Zohar Shavit

Fairy Tale and Dream: “Little Red Riding Hood” by Géza Róheim

Little Red Cap and the Pubertal Girl by Bruno Bettelheim

Interpreting “Little Red Riding Hood” Psychoanalytically by Alan Dundes

Suggestions for Further Reading on “Little Red Riding Hood”: A Selected

Bibliography

Index