This volume offers a comprehensive critical and theoretical introduction to the genre of the fairy tale. It explores the ways in which folklorists have defined the genre assesses the various methodologies used in the analysis and interpretation of fairy tale provides a detailed account of the historical development of the fairy tale as a literary form engages with the major ideological controversies that have shaped critical and creative approaches to fairy tales in the 20th and 21st centuries demonstrates that the fairy tale is a highly metamorphic genre that has flourished in diverse...

This volume offers a comprehensive critical and theoretical introduction to the genre of the fairy tale. It:

• explores the ways in which folklorists have defined the genre
• assesses the various methodologies used in the analysis and interpretation of fairy tale
• provides a detailed account of the historical development of the fairy tale as a literary form
• engages with the major ideological controversies that have shaped critical and creative approaches to fairy tales in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries
• demonstrates that the fairy...

This is the first critical edition of the works of Andrew Lang, the Scottish writer whose enormous output spanned the whole the range of late-nineteenth century intellectual culture: from literary criticism to anthropology, magic to archaeology, folklore to Scottish history. Critically neglected since his death, partly because of the diversity of his interests and the volume of his writing, he was central to some of the most important debates of the period. This, and the interdisciplinary nature of his work, makes him an important figure for contemporary scholars