Fairy Tales

Click on any of the titles below to reach a downloadable PDF of the piece of writing.

And the Prince turned into a Peasant and Lived Happily Ever After: A review of Jack Zipes’ Breaking the Magic Spell. (review of Jack Zipes’ Breaking the Magic Spell

The Case of the Disappearing Jew: a discussion of the implications of a Penguin Puffin edition of the 1823 English version of Grimm brothers’s tales changing the original “The Jew in the Bush” to “The Miser in the Bush”

The Hidden Meaning and the Inner Tale: Deconstruction and the interpretation of Fairy Tales (on how Derrida might help to account for fairy tales)

“Little Red Riding Hood” as a Canadian Fairy Tale: A discussion of a classroom exercise in which students all wrote down the versions of the story of Little Red Riding Hood as they recalled it. In response to my thoughtless generalizations about the European ancestry of Canadians, Agnes Grant responded to this essay in a later issue of Canadian Children’s Literature in which she describes the quite different results to the same experiment produced by the Indigenous students in her own class. I’ve included Grant’s essay along with my own.

Little Red Riding Hood Rides Again–and Again and Again and Again (The commonalties and differing details of thirty different inexpensive picture book versions of the well-known fairy tale)

Once: The Land and Its People: A statistical analysis of the records gathered by the brothers Grimm, in an attempt to establish the geographical, demographic, and sociological characteristics of the land called Once, the setting for their reports of Oncean history (A paper originally presented at a Children’s Literature Association conference in 1984.)

Teaching a Unit of Fairy Tales: circa 1982

What Makes a Fairy Tale Good: the Queer Kindness of “The Golden Bird” (my first academic publication, based on my first conference paper)