The Irresistible Fairy Tale: The Cultural and Social History of a Genre

List of Illustrations ix Preface xi Acknowledgments xvii Chapter 1: The Cultural Evolution of Storytelling and Fairy Tales: Human Communication and Memetics 1 Chapter 2: The Meaning of Fairy Tale within the Evolution of Culture 21 Chapter 3: Remaking "Bluebeard," or Good-bye to Perrault 41 Chapter 4: Witch as Fairy/Fairy as Witch: Unfathomable Baba Yagas 55 Chapter 5: The Tales of Innocent Persecuted Heroines and Their Neglected Female Storytellers and Collectors 80 Chapter 6: Giuseppe Pitre and the Great Collectors of Folk Tales in the Nineteenth Century 109 Chapter 7: Fairy-Tale Collisions, or the Explosion of a Genre 135 Appendix A: Sensationalist Scholarship: A "New" History of Fairy Tales 157 Appendix B: Reductionist Scholarship: A "New" Definition of the Fairy Tale 175 Notes 191 Bibliography 209 Index 227