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.