What does fairy tale mean?

Fairy tale is a kind of children's literature. According to the characteristics of children, the plot is developed through fantasy, exaggeration and anthropomorphism, creating images and reflecting social life.

Fairy tales were originally part of traditional oral folklore, often told dramatically and passed down from generation to generation by word of mouth. As a result, the history of fairy tales is difficult to verify. In particular, the stories told by early illiterate storytellers usually have no written record for posterity.

Expanded Information

Fairy tale is one of the genres of children's literature, shaping images through rich fantasy and the techniques of exaggeration, symbolism and anthropomorphism, in order to be suitable for children to read. Fairy tale is one of the genres of children's literature, through rich imagination, fantasy and exaggeration written for children to enjoy the story.

Fairy tales are a genre of children's literature. This kind of work through the rich imagination, exaggeration and symbols to shape the image, reflecting the life, to children's ideological education. The language is popular and vivid, and the storyline is often bizarre and intriguing.

Fairy tales often use anthropomorphic methods, such as flowers, birds, insects and fish, flowers, plants and trees, the whole of nature, as well as furniture, toys can be given to life, injected into the thoughts and feelings, so that they are personified. And also divided into two categories, one is created by the writer, the famous Danish "Hans Christian Andersen's Fairy Tales", Germany's "Hauffe's Fairy Tales", Britain's "Wilde's Fairy Tales".

The other category is in the people's masses oral circulation, after a person with the intention of searching, organizing and become, the famous "Grimm's Fairy Tales", such as "Snow White", "Little Red Riding Hood", "Cinderella", etc., are selected from it.

Initially, the audience of fairy tales included adults in addition to children, but after the 19th and 20th centuries, fairy tales began to gradually transform into a part of children's literature.

The French précieuses, including Madame Aulnoy, tried to extend their works for adults to children. A countess of the time also declared that she would have enjoyed reading fairy tales if she had remained a child.

A later précieuses, Jeanne-Marie Le Prince de Beaumont, rewrote Beauty and the Beast for a children's audience, and her version is the one that survives today. And the Brothers Grimm, after their Fairy Tales for Children and Families were published, responded to reader complaints by rewriting their stories into more child-friendly versions.

In modern times, fairy tales have been transformed into versions suitable for children. The Brothers Grimm also worked to reduce the amount of sex in their stories in order to make them more suitable for children.

In the first version of the Grimm's fairy tale, Rapunzel begins to ask the witch why her dress is getting tighter after a few late-night visits from the prince, so the witch knows that Rapunzel is pregnant, but in the next version, it was revised to make it easier to pull on the prince and harder to pull on the witch.

However subsequent versions have increased in violence (like punishment for bad guys) instead. But Tolkien also found that the cannibal's kebabs in the story of The Juniper Tree had been dropped from one of the versions to make it more suitable for children.

And in the Victorian era, stories were often rewritten to be edifying because of the context. Dickens, for example, protested against Prohibition, which appears in the Cinderella story.

Adaptations of fairy tales for children continued well into the twentieth century. Disney's Snow White was made primarily for children. And the Japanese animation Magic Little Princess is also an adaptation of a fairy tale.

The logic of fairy tales refers to the law of combining fantasy and reality. All fairy tales are fictional, but some seem to make sense when read, while others feel far-fetched. The reason lies in the fact that the former conforms to the logic of the fairy tale, while the latter ignores it to the point of destroying the rationality of the whole story.

The logic of the fairy tale is built on assumptions, that is, the author must provide a hypothetical condition for the activities of the fantasy characters, the development of the fictional storyline, and then from this hypothetical premise, to make things go on according to their own logic, so that the imaginary characters in the imaginary conditions of the living environment, the reasonable and natural development.

Baidu Encyclopedia - Fairy Tales