Fairy Tales are the origin of children's literature and encourage dynamic discussion and thinking.
Tuesday, December 10, 2024
fairy tale-inspired graphic with a purple background.
IMAGE VIA SOPHIA CONSIDINE / CANVA

In the Fall 2023 semester, Lori Branch taught a Topics in Modern British Lit in the 1900s class titled, The Fairy Tale and Its Literary Legacies. This course explores the profound impact of oral folklore and the print fairy tale tradition on modern British literature and Fall 2023 was the first run of the class. As someone with an immense interest in fairy tales—shown by the fact that I took a class on various Cinderella literature in a previous semester—I was overjoyed when I learned that Professor Branch was teaching this course.

 

The Fairy Tale and Its Literary Legacies stemmed from Professor Branch’s Children’s Literature class, which discussed fairy tales for the first quarter of the semester and then moved on to cover everything from the middle of the 19th century to the present. However, there was too much to cover. 

A portrait photo of Lori Branch.
Lori Branch

 

“I kept trying to cut down the fairy tale unit, and I couldn’t. It was always like bursting at the seams, and I wanted to teach more about it, and I kept feeling that there were other works I wanted to fit in… But students were always saying, ‘oh, why don’t we do Peter Pan? Oh, why don’t we do Winnie the Pooh?’ There’s just so many other things that would fit just in British children’s literature,” Branch said. 

 

After identifying that struggle, Branch came up with the idea to make the fairy tale unit into its own course. This class delved into classic fairy tales with attention to their structure, psychological contours, and print format. We read older, “original” European fairy tale writers, like Charles Perrault, Hans Christen Andersen, and the Brothers Grimm. Then, we read popular fairy tale novelists like George MacDonald, and J.R.R. Tolkien’s “On Fairy Stories” essay. As we came to the modern era, we read books like The Buried Giant by Kazuo Ishiguro and Mr. Fox by Helen Oyeyemi. Going through the chronological progression was important to help us learn what the definition of a fairy tale is, and how and why a modern novel may be a retelling. 

 

“[Fairy tales] connect us to our own childhood a lot of the time. And then what’s really neat about when you have people in their early 20s in a college class like this, a lot of them [might] become parents in the next decade of their life, or sometimes people in that class said, ‘I love reading this to my younger brother or sister…’ It’s connecting them to other people in a unique way, unique to the fairy tale class,” Branch said. 

 

Taking time to think and analyze what a fairy tale truly is, in the context of how society sees it versus what it really is, was a key to helping me think deeper about seemingly simple things like children’s stories or cartoons. Providing a class with the topic of fairy tales made it more interesting for me to listen, engage, and understand not only the material, but the world and society around me more clearly. 

 

Professor Branch shares the sentiment of C.S. Lewis: “He uses a metaphor that Tolkien also uses, which he says that fairy tales have been relegated to the nursery, like old furniture. And what we need to realize is that that furniture used to be very respectively in the living room. And just because it’s old doesn’t mean that necessarily belongs in the nursery.”