ENGL 218: Beyond Enchantment: Fairy Tales as Literature

For many; if not most of us; the phrase “fairy tales conjures up images of Disney Princesses; of castles; and magic; and talking animals; and happily ever after. But fairy tales in the Western literary tradition have always been far from innocent. They are instead a complex literary and story-based mirror of the cultures from which they originated; both reinforcing and rebelling against gender; class; and social norms. We will read multiple versions of the tales from the earliest known versions to versions in the present day; learning to approach them from a literary; historical; sociological; psychanalytic; and feminist point of view.