Definition and Characteristics of Fairy Tales

Fairy tales are a kind of children's literature. Through rich imagination, fantasy and exaggeration to shape the image, reflect life, ideological education for children. Generally, the storyline is magical and twisted, vivid and shallow, and the natural objects are often anthropomorphized, which can adapt to children's receptivity. (Dictionary)

Fairy tales are an important genre of children's literature. It is a kind of fictional story with strong color of fantasy, mostly using exaggerations, anthropomorphisms, symbols and other expressive methods to weave bizarre plots. Fantasy is the basic feature of fairy tale, and it is also a special artistic means to reflect the life of fairy tale. Fairy tales mainly depict virtual things and realms, and the "characters" appearing in them are not real imaginary images, and the stories they tell are also impossible. However, all the fantasies in fairy tales are rooted in reality and are a kind of refraction of life. Fairy tale creation generally use hyperbole and anthropomorphism, and follow a certain logic to carry out the bizarre plot, resulting in a strong fantasy atmosphere and beyond the constraints of space and time, but also real, like a real real realm. In addition, it also often adopts symbolic techniques to shape fantasy images in order to insinuate and summarize the personnel relations in reality. (Dictionary of Children's Literature))

From the point of view of the method of expression, the fairy tale is roughly divided into three kinds of super human fairy tale, anthropomorphic human fairy tale and normal human fairy tale. However, these three are not distinctly separate, and are sometimes related to each other. That is to say, in a fairy tale, there may be both the normal human body expression method, there are also anthropomorphic human body expression method. And so on with the others.

From the subject matter, fairy tales (the big concept of "fairy tales") are divided into scientific fairy tales (also known as "knowledge fairy tales") and literary fairy tales (also known as "moral fairy tales"). (also known as "fairy tales of knowledge") and literary fairy tales (also known as "fairy tales of character"). The usual "fairy tales" are by default "literary fairy tales".