The 2010 Meeting of the American Folklore Society's theme was "Lay and
Expert Knowledge". This seems really pertinent to this list where we have
academic scholars, non-academic scholars and practitioners of magic, lay and
expert knowledge... but when it comes to magic, who is the laity and who are
the experts?

~Caroline.



Fairy Tales: A New History. By Ruth B. Bottigheimer. 2009. Albany:
State University of New York Press. 128 pages. ISBN:
978-1-4384-2523-8 (hard cover), 978-1-4384-2524-5 (soft cover). 

Reviewed by Donald Haase, Wayne State University ([log in to unmask]).

[Word count: 2172 words]

In his address on the Arabian Nights at the 2010 Meeting of the
American Folklore Society, where the theme was "Lay and Expert
Knowledge," Ulrich Marzolph emphasized the scholar's responsibility
to claim authority and to embrace the role of expert, thereby serving
as the voice that eschews oversimplification and takes responsibility
for documenting complexity. Marzolph recognized that efforts to
communicate nuanced specialized knowledge to a broader public can
easily be dismissed with responses like: "Who wants to know what
scholars think about fairy tales?" "Who cares?" Marzolph's
reflections on scholarly expertise prompt us to ask ourselves how
experts can communicate their work to so-called general readers when
complexity is perceived as annoying.

One strategy would be to abandon complexity altogether. Such is the
case with Fairy Tales: A New History, which truncates the history of
the fairy tale to the point that it abdicates its claim to being a
history at all. The book was issued under the Excelsior Editions
imprint of the State University Press of New York, which -- the
publisher's website tells us -- "aims to enrich the cultural lives
and historical understanding of all New Yorkers . . . [but whose
books] will appeal to general readers across the country and around
the world."[1] Indeed, the volume must have been written for "general
readers" since it could not have been written for an audience who
knows anything about the complex and richly populated history of the
fairy tale, or who is aware of the course of fairy-tale scholarship
over the last forty years. When read from inside fairy-tale
scholarship -- that is, when read from an expert's perspective --
Fairy Tales: A New History says little that is actually new.
Moreover, this history of a genre discusses tales by a mere eleven
authors (151-52), all from before 1857 and representing almost
exclusively Italy (sixteenth-seventeenth centuries), France
(seventeenth-eighteenth centuries), and Germany (nineteenth century).
It does not even mention, let alone seriously consider, any number of
fundamentally important writers, such as Antoine Galland, whose Les
Mille et une Nuits had a profound impact on the history of the fairy
tale in the West, or Ludwig Tieck and Novalis, to name only two
innovative German authors of literary fairy tales who preceded the
Grimms. Consequently, this book does not constitute a history of
fairy tales, let alone a new history of fairy tales.

A book that proclaims itself as a new history of fairy tales could
only become one by specifically engaging the existing history and the
scholarship that embodies it. This is fundamental to scholarly
method. Yet Fairy Tales: A New History does no such thing. It never
explicitly documents the failures it ascribes to contemporary
scholarship and scholars; it merely asserts their existence. The
book's introduction, for example, goes on and on about the "current
understanding of the history of fairy tales" (2) on the part of
scholars; but by the end of the chapter -- indeed, by the end of the
book -- there is no evidence presented to substantiate Ruth
Bottigheimer's claims about these for the most part unnamed
contemporary scholars, whose works are never cited.

To be sure, the works of Bruno Bettelheim and Jack Zipes are invoked
on the second page of the book. But no fairy-tale scholar would cite
Bettelheim's work as representative of contemporary fairy-tale
scholarship. And the innocuous discussion of Zipes consists of two
sentences that do nothing to implicate him in the history that the
book is purporting to disprove. Two brief sentences concerning Zipes
appear a few pages later in a discussion of definitions of the fairy
tale, but beyond these brief references and two endnotes, the book
does not engage or specifically refute either Zipes, whose
continuously emerging work is not easily summarized with reductive
characterizations, or any other of the supposedly "many fairy tale
scholars in the United States, England, France, and Germany" (2-3)
who subscribe to oralist views built on what the book calls a "flimsy
foundation" (2). Nearly all we know about the "other" and the "other
side" in this volume is what the author tells us in very broad
generalities and without documentation: "Most traditional histories .
. ."; "It has been said . . ." (1); "people who subscribe to . . ."
(2); "many fairy-tale scholars . . ." (2-3); "many scholars . . ."
(3); "it is often said . . ."; "the widespread belief . . ." (6); and
so on. This mode of argumentation and the absence of specific
evidence and refutation do not reflect a book of peer-reviewed
scholarship, but one in which scholarly method has broken down or
been abandoned.

The book also minimizes or overlooks the contributions of important
scholars who have actually helped pioneer the print history of the
fairy tale that Ruth Bottigheimer privileges. I think, for example,
of Nancy Canepa, whose brilliant translation of Basile is cited, but
whose two profoundly important books on the genesis of the literary
fairy tale are cited nowhere in the volume. How can Canepa's
groundbreaking 1998 compendium, Out of the Woods: The Origins of the
Literary Fairy Tale in Italy and France, and her 1999 monograph, From
Court to Forest: Giambattista Basile's Lo Cunto de li Cunti and the
Birth of the Literary Fairy Tale, not be invoked as volumes central
to the development (notice, over a decade ago) of the "new" history
Bottigheimer is claiming to write? Twenty of Bottigheimer's own works
are represented in the bibliography (including a slew of encyclopedia
and dictionary entries), but Canepa's major and truly relevant works
apparently do not merit being brought to the reader's attention.

There is at least one additional publication missing from the
bibliography whose inclusion and discussion could have documented the
orality-based history that Bottigheimer wants to debunk and which
could have helped her explain to the reader how and why that
allegedly fallacious history is so seductive and persistent. The
publication in question -- an article published in New German
Critique in 1982 -- contains numerous statements that reveal the
author's reliance on an orality-based history of the fairy tale,
despite the expert knowledge, already then in circulation among
scholars, that the Grimms had edited their tales after collecting
them from literate sources. Take, for example, the following:

"Unlike the tales produced for polite society such as Contes
nouvelles ou les Fées à la mode by Madame d'Aulnoy (1698), German
folk tales were assumed to have originated in or to have passed
through in many cases the Spinnstube, for it was there that women
gathered in the evening and told tales to keep themselves and their
company awake as they spun. And it was from informants privy to this
oral tradition that Wilhelm and Jacob Grimm gathered many of their
folk tales. Thus, we can assume a personal relationship between the
tales that follow and spinners themselves."

By citing statements such as this, Bottigheimer could have
demonstrated quite authoritatively that there are indeed actual
identifiable scholars who subscribe to what she considers a
thoroughly fallacious and, as she suggests on page 2 of her book,
embarrassing view of the fairy tale's history. Now, whether she
decided not to cite this text or not to include it in her
bibliography because she herself is the author of this article, I do
not know (above quotation from Bottigheimer 1982:143). To be sure, it
is a piece of scholarship from 1982; but if Bottigheimer can cite
Bettelheim's book of 1976 as an example of "recent" scholarship (2),
why not an article of 1982? Of course, we all have the right to
change our minds. Still, given that views of this kind now lead her
to write a counter-narrative -- a re-purposed history of the fairy
tale -- and to make a claim for it on the basis of singularly-held
expert knowledge, one might expect the book to offer something by way
of truth in advertising, a brief mea culpa to let us know that even
the experts can be wrong, or -- better -- a candid and critical
self-reflection to demonstrate how intellectual positions develop,
take hold, lose their grip, and change. This could be an excellent
example of how we re-purpose ourselves in a sobering cycle of
self-assurance and humility, a repeating, never-ending restoration
tale, if you will. This is the kind of candid work that Jack Zipes
does -- if anyone cares to read his books, especially the
introductions, very carefully -- in his ceaseless efforts be
self-critical, to be open to diversity, dissent, and complexity, and
to help build a discipline on expert knowledge, which is not
necessarily the same as authority.[2]

There is more to say about Fairy Tales: A New History -- about why it
is not a history, not new, its oversimplifications and stifling focus
on print history, its tendency to throw out the folk with the
fallacy, and its problematic discussion of the fairy tale as genre.
And there is a telling problem with the promotional materials on the
publisher's website, which I mention in the spirit of book history.
Not recognizing its own pitch for the book, the publisher unwittingly
quotes its own back-cover blurb as if it were the excerpt of a book
review from Fabula,[3] which in this case is not the prestigious
journal of folk-narrative research published in Germany, but actually
the French website Fabula.org, which had merely posted information
about the book along with the publisher's own promotional text.[4]
What appears at first to be authoritative confirmation of the book's
scholarly value turns out to be a case of the publisher's failure to
recognize its own publicity.

While this is revealing in the context of scholarly publishing and
marketing, such an oversight is certainly fixable. The other problems
in this volume and the implications they have for a new generation of
students and scholars threaten to be long term. What, in particular,
will be the consequences for the sociohistorical study of narrative
if new readers buy into the guiding notion of the book? And by "the
guiding notion of the book" I do not mean the idea that print culture
plays a significant role in the history of the fairy tale. Of course
it does; I do not know of a single recognized scholar of the fairy
tale who would deny that. And Zipes, for one, had noted nearly thirty
years ago the debt of French writers to Basile and Straparola
(1983:14, 27). I mean, instead, the simplistic and universalizing
notion that tales produced in sixteenth-century Venice by Straparola
and by the authors that came in his wake are, as the book's final
sentence proclaims, "stories about people like us." We may be, as
Alan Dundes told us, the folk; but I am not convinced that "we" are
always and in all circumstances "us." Who, after all, is the implied
reader that Bottigheimer is addressing here, especially in an era of
intensely global scholarly communication? Are New York readers, as
the Excelsior Editions website implies, the same as readers "across
the country and around the world"? And after decades of
sociohistorical and sociocultural criticism, do we really want to
abandon all nuance and complexity by implying that social, cultural,
historical, and political contexts make no difference in the
production and reception of fairy tales? "They are stories about
people like us" is not even an oversimplification. It is an
ahistorical, feel-good assertion that does no justice to the nuance,
complexity, and diversity that make fairy-tale studies or any form of
literary, media, and cultural studies so rich and, yes, so difficult.

It is important that these matters be recognized because -- as we
know from Marzolph's AFS lecture -- readers without expert knowledge
will tend to shy away from the complexity that comes with the best,
most exemplary scholarship. "Who needs it?" "Who cares?" For those
who feel that way or for those seeking a quick, slick, uncomplicated
entry into fairy-tale scholarship or a volume their students can
digest as easily as a tweet, this book fits the bill. Caveat emptor.
Caveat lector.	

[1]
http://www.sunypress.edu/l-25-excelsior-editions-trade-books.aspx.
Accessed 22 June 2011.

[2] For examples of Zipes's self-critical, self-reflective approach,
see Zipes, 2002:x; 2006:x-xi; 2009:xi-xii. For his dislike of the
term "authority," see Bannerman 2002.

[3] http://www.sunypress.edu/p-4772-fairy-tales.aspx. Accessed 22
June 2011.

[4]
http://www.fabula.org/actualites/rb-bottigheimer-fairy-tales-a-new-history_3
1139.php.
Accessed 22 June 2011.

WORKS CITED

Bottigheimer, Ruth B. 1982. "Tale Spinners: Submerged Voices in
Grimms' Fairy Tales." New German Critique 27:141-50.

Bannerman, Kenn. 2002. "A Short Interview with Jack Zipes."
http://www.bitingdogpress.com/zipes/zipes.html

Canepa, Nancy L, ed. 1997. Out of the Woods: The Origins of the
Literary Fairy Tales in Italy and France. Detroit: Wayne State
University Press.

 -- . 1999. From Court to Forest: Giambattista Basile's Lo Cunto de
li Cunti and the Birth of the Literary Fairy Tale. Detroit: Wayne
State University Press.

Zipes, Jack. 1983. Fairy Tales and the Art of Subversion: The
Classical Genre for Children and the Process of Civilization. New
York: Wildman Press.

 -- . 2002. Breaking the Magic Spell: Radical Theories of Folk and
Fairy Tales. Revised edition. Lexington: University Press of
Kentucky.

 -- . 2006. Why Fairy Tales Stick: The Evolution and Relevance of a
Genre. New York: Routledge.

 -- . 2009. Relentless Progress: The Reconfiguration of Children's
Literature, Fairy Tales, and Storytelling. New York: Routledge.

---------

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