(no subject)

[adiva_calandia]

F-list, solve my life for me.

Are Alice's Adventures in Wonderland and Through the Looking Glass fairy tales?

Important question is important! Seriously!

Comments

[adiva_calandia]

And this is my problem: if I start thinking about fairy tales, I can name any number of short stories and even movies off the top of my head that are deliberately constructed as fairy tales. As mentioned, Pan's Labyrinth; Isaac Asimov's The Fable of the Three Princes; Wilde's The Selfish Giant; like a quarter of Neil Gaiman's oeuvre . . . Yeah, oftentimes these stories are written to subvert some aspect of fairy tales, but you can write a haiku that subverts the form, too. (Haiku isn't hard / You just need seventeen syll / ables to do it.)

But I dunno. I lean towards agreeing with Ashie as a general rule: an author's name under the title makes a text fairy tale like rather than a fairy tale. Fairy tales are unattributed. Which I guess makes Andersen's stories the exception that proves the rule.

But I also think Alice has structural, ah, oddities that preclude it from being a fairy tale.

(Can one make a statement like "It waddles a little like a duck, and people treat it like a duck, but it's really still a goose" in an academic article and still be taken seriously? >.>)

[batyatoon]

(Well, if your academic article is about fairytales, you should end that with "but it's really a BABY SWAN".)

I don't know if I agree that fairytales are unattributed, is the thing. But there's no real way to determine whether or not that's part of the definition, except by declaring it so (or not).

[beyondthesunset.livejournal.com]

LOLing at the baby swan.

I don't think attribution or the lack thereof is as important in this context as structure. It is certainly a part of our common definition, but as you pointed out, there are modern stories that are definitely fairy-tale like. We may have to draw a distinction between folklore/folktale and fairy tale. They often overlap, but one is not always both. Then there are other archetypal stories; they may fit into Jung's collective unconsciousness, but I don't think of them as fairy tales.

The cause-and-effect structure you mentioned might be a good working definition; you can flesh it out as you go.