Library Essentials: The Classic Fairy Tales by Maria Tatar

The Classic Fairy Tales (Norton Critical Editions) by Maria Tatar is one of today's library essentials. (I have another Tatar book also appearing in a second post.) This is a great companion to The Great Fairy Tale Tradition--it was actually published first. This, too, is often used as a textbook but I'll just let the description and table of contents speak for themselves.

Book description from the publisher:

Fairy tales shape our cultures and enrich our imaginations; their narrative stability and cultural durability are incontestable.

This Norton Critical Edition collects forty-four fairy tales, from the fifth century to the present. The Classic Fairy Tales focuses on six tale types: "Little Red Riding Hood," "Beauty and the Beast," "Snow White," "Cinderella," "Bluebeard," and "Hansel and Gretel," and presents multicultural variants and sophisticated literary rescriptings. Also reprinted are tales by Hans Christian Andersen and Oscar Wilde.

"Criticism" gathers twelve essays that interpret aspects of fairy tales, including their social origins, historical evolution, psychological drama, gender issues, and national identities.

A Selected Bibliography is included.

Table of Contents:

Introduction

The Texts of The Classic Fairy Tales

INTRODUCTION: Little Red Riding Hood
The Story of Grandmother
Charles Perrault, Little Red Riding Hood
Brothers Grimm, Little Red Cap
James Thurber, The Little Girl and the Wolf
Italo Calvino, The False Grandmother
Chiang Mi, Goldflower and the Bear
Roald Dahl, Little Red Riding Hood and the Wolf
Roald Dahl, The Three Little Pigs

INTRODUCTION: Beauty and the Beast
Jeanne-Marie Leprince de Beaumont, Beauty and the Beast
Giovanni Francesco Straparola, The Pig King
Brothers Grimm, The Frog King, or Iron Heinrich
Angela Carter, The Tiger’s Bride
Urashima the Fisherman
Alexander Afanasev, The Frog Princess
The Swan Maiden

INTRODUCTION: Snow White
Giambattista Basile, The Young Slave
Brothers Grimm, Snow White
Lasair Gheug, the King of Ireland’s Daughter
Anne Sexton, Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs

INTRODUCTION: Cinderella
Yeh-hsien
Charles Perrault, Donkeyskin
Brothers Grimm, Cinderella
Joseph Jacobs, Catskin
The Story of the Black Cow
Lin Lan, Cinderella
The Princess in the Suit of Leather

INTRODUCTION: Bluebeard
Charles Perrault, Bluebeard
Brothers Grimm, Fitcher’s Bird
Brother’s Grimm, The Robber Bridegroom
Joseph Jacobs, Mr. Fox
Margaret Atwood, Bluebeard’s Egg

INTRODUCTION: Hansel and Gretel
Brothers Grimm, Hansel and Gretel
Brothers Grimm, The Juniper Tree
Joseph Jacobs, The Rose-Tree
Charles Perrault, Little Thumbling
Pippety Pew
Joseph Jacobs, Molly Whuppie

INTRODUCTION: Hans Christian Andersen
The Little Mermaid
The Little Match Girl
The Girl Who Trod on the Loaf
The Red Shoes

INTRODUCTION: Oscar Wilde
The Selfish Giant
The Happy Prince
The Nightingale and the Rose

Criticism
Bruno Bettelheim, [The Struggle for Meaning]
Bruno Bettelheim, “Hansel and Gretel”
Robert Darnton, Peasants Tell Tales: The Meaning of Mother Goose
Sandra M. Gilbert and Susan Gubar, [Snow White and Her Wicked Stepmother]
Karen E. Rowe, To Spin a Yarn: The Female Voice in Folklore and Fairy Tale
Marina Warner, The Old Wives’ Tale
Zohar Shavit, The Concept of Childhood and Children’s Folktales: Test Case―“Little Red Riding Hood”
Jack Zipes, Breaking the Disney Spell
Donald Haase, Yours, Mine, or Ours? Perrault, the Brothers Grimm, and the Ownership of Fairy Tales
Maria Tatar, Sex and Violence: The Hard Core of Fairy Tales
Antti Aarne and Sith Thompson, From The Types of the Folktale: A Classification and Bibliography
Vladimir Propp, Folklore and Literature
From Morphology of the Folktale
The Method and Material

Thirty-One Functions
Propp’s Dramatis Personae

Selected Bibliography

See? Worth every word and every penny...