Straparola and the Fairy Tale: Between Literary and Oral Traditions

Abstract

fairy godfather: straparola, venice, and the fairy tale tradition (2002), a tract of around 150 pages, delivers a major thrust in a war that its author, Ruth B. Bottigheimer, has been waging at least since 1994. The book will not become a landmark in folkloristics in general, and only time will tell if it has a lasting impact even within fairy-tale studies. Yet although the book is sui generis, the views that it advocates and the controversies it arouses relate to important issues in folklore studies, beyond what the specificity of its title might suggest. Indeed, Bottigheimer's book opens up grand questions about the definition of fairy tale as a genre, about the status of the centuries-old search for the origins of fairy tales, about the relationships between orality and literacy, and about the relevance of recent directions in performance studies to folktale and fairy-tale studies. A still larger issue that this sort of book might induce folklorists to ponder is what place the study of folktales should occupy within folkloristics as a whole: folktales were foundational in the history of folklore studies in the nineteenth century and later, but as a lingering romantic nostalgia for folk culture has given way to a postmodern gusto for mass culture, it may be only natural that the tales have come to play a diminished role today.

A Broader and Deeper Idea of Fairy Tale: Reassessing Concept, Meaning, and Function of the Most Debated Genre in Folk Narrative Research

“…For instance, the heated dispute raised by the controversial thesis expressed by Ruth Bottigheimer (2002, 2009) is quite significant. Her advocating an exclusively literary and relatively recent origin (16th century) of the fairy tale as a genre has entailed a number of vivid replies, above all, those of such eminent scholars as Jan Ziolkowski (2010), Francisco Vaz da Silva (2010), Dan Ben-Amos (2010) and, in a more biting way, Jack Zipes (2010). For an interesting and pondered point of view on the latest developments in this debate cf.…”