On the Nature of Fairy Tales

Interview with Ruth Bottigheimer

Abstract

The 12th edition of Literartes Journal, the second issue dedicated to artistic, theoretical and critical reflections on the fairy tale in its multiple supports and media, is pleased to interview one of the greatest world references in this field of research: Ruth Bottigheimer, professor at the Department of Cultural Analysis and Theory at the New York Public University at Stony Brook.

Ruth devoted much of her academic investigation to areas such as Germanic Language and Literature, Medieval History, History of Illustration and History of the Bible. She graduated from the University of Berkeley, California, the University of Munich and the University College of London. Over more than fifty years of researching, Ruth Bottigheimer taught at the Universities of Vienna, Princeton and California. She is a member of the International Society for Folk Narrative Research and the Children’s Literature Association, among others.

Among her main works, stands out: Grimm’s Bad Girls and Bold Boys: The Moral and Social Vision of the Tales (Yale University Press, 1987), Fairy Tales and Society: Illusion, Allusion and Paradigm (University of Pennsylvania Press, 1987), Fairy Godfather: Straparola, Venice, and the Fairy Tale Tradition (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2002), Fairy Tales: A New History (State University of New York Press, 2009), Fairy Tales Framed: Early Forewords, Afterwords, and Critical Words (State University of New York Press, 2012) e Magic Tales and Fairy Tale Magic from Ancient Egypt to the Italian Renaissance (Palgrave Macmillan, 2014).

In this interview, we explored themes such as the story of the fairy tale, the model sources of the genre and the fairy tales of female authorship, inviting our readers to reflect on the most recent discoveries made in this field of studies.