Nowadays we think of fairy tales as being for children, but the earliest fairy tales--and many since--were told to or written for adults. In other words, this course in fairy tales is not a course in children's literature or a chance to relive the spells of childhood. Rather we will examine the way tales express a culture's deepest hopes and anxieties about sex and the body, family relations, gender roles, social hierarchies, food, physical labor, violence, and death.

We'll begin by looking at several versions of one tale (probably "Sleeping Beauty" this year) and at some of the ways the story has been interpreted by structuralist, psychoanalytic, Marxist, and feminist critics. Then we'll go on to look at the earliest fairy tales written in France by Charles Perrault, Marie-Catherine d'Aulnoy, Catherine Bernard, and others, late in the reign of Louis XIV, to see how the stories both reproduce and criticize the social arrangements of the time. Why did people begin to write tales down in France in the 1690s? What are some of the differences between the tales written by men and the tales written by women? Why did Perrault's tales become the French fairy tales?

Later we will look at the ways the stories were translated, rewritten, and transformed throughout the eighteenth century and the revival of interest in supposedly "old" tales in the romantic period, particularly in Germany. Why did it then mean to "collect" fairy tales? Why were some people collecting (the Grimms) while others were writing new ones (Goethe, Tieck, Novalis and others)? How were our current notions about fairy tales formed, and why were most tales written by women excluded from the list?

We'll continue by looking at collecting and writing in the nineteenth century: the multi-colored Fairy Books put together by Andrew Lang; the tales written by Hans Christian Andersen, Oscar Wilde, Christina Rossetti, Anne Thackeray Ritchie, and others. In the last weeks of the course we'll look at what Anne Sexton calls "transformations" of traditional tales in the twentieth century, mainly by women: poetry by Anne Sexton, Olga Broumas, and Lisel Mueller; stories by Angela Carter, Tanith Lee, Emma Donoghue, and others. We will also read an autobiography by Carolyn Steedman, called Landscape for a Good Woman, to see what role fairy tales can play in non-fictional prose and in a woman's life.

There will be a substantial amount of critical writing (probably two short papers and a longer one), a fair amount of theoretical reading (as well as reading of tales), regular contributions to an electronic bulletin board (get an e-mail account now), and frequent work in groups.

NOTE: This course is not open to first-year students, or to anyone who has not had at least one college-level course in literature.