Lecture 7

Grimms’ Fairy Tales

  • Realism
    • Too much imagination, too much magic, in romanticism.
    • Middle or lower class people.
    • No idealization of them, but poetic.
    • No strong moralizing.
    • “Hold a mirror up to society.”
    • Realist literature is trying to say something about society.

A Modern Fairy Tale

  • “Sunday’s child” = an unlucky child

Spiegal the Cat

  • This is a story about a talking cat and witches/wizards, but there’s still realist themes.
  • How might a fairy tale be able to talk about society without directly moralizing about it?