What is a fairy tale

Fairy tales are a kind of children's literature. Through rich imagination, fantasy and exaggeration to shape the image, reflect life, and carry out ideological education for children. The general story is magical and tortuous, vivid and simple, and the description of natural objects is often anthropomorphic, which can adapt to children's acceptance. (Ci Hai)

Fairy tales are an important genre of children's literature. It is a fictional story with a strong fantasy color, and it uses exaggeration, personification, symbolism and other expressions to weave strange plots. Fantasy is the basic feature of fairy tales, and it is also a special artistic means for fairy tales to reflect life. Fairy tales mainly depict virtual things and realms, and the "characters" appearing in them are not real imaginary images, and the stories told are impossible. But all kinds of fantasies in fairy tales are rooted in reality and are a kind of refraction of life. Fairy tale creation generally uses exaggeration and personification, and follows certain logical logic to develop bizarre plots, resulting in a strong fantasy atmosphere and a realm that transcends the constraints of time and space, which is also virtual and real, and seems to be illusory and true. In addition, it often uses symbolic techniques to create fantasy images to insinuate and summarize the real human relations. (Dictionary of Children's Literature)

From the perspective of expression methods, fairy tales can be roughly divided into three types: super-human fairy tales, anthropomorphic fairy tales and normal human fairy tales. But these three are not completely separated, and sometimes they are related to each other. That is to say, in a fairy tale, there may be both normal human expression and quasi-human expression. And so on, and so on.

From the perspective of performance theme, fairy tales (fairy tales of big concepts) can be divided into two categories: scientific fairy tales (also known as "knowledge fairy tales") and literary fairy tales (also known as "moral fairy tales"). The usual "fairy tale" defaults to "literary fairy tale".