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Fall 2019 LIT 270

Global Fairy Tales
Professor: Jo Carney
Course Meetings: Monday/Thursday 3:30-4:50pm

The familiar fairy tales you know through cultural osmosis represent a small segment of the fairy tale canon: there is a rich tradition of the adult literary fairy tale that comprises writers from Renaissance Italy, seventeenth-century France, and the folklore movement of the German Romantic period. Works by Giambattista Basile, Marie D’Aulnoy, the Brothers Grimm, and others have in turn been transformed by contemporary and postmodern writers, such as Margaret Atwood, Angela Carter, and Robert Coover.

Fairy tale influence is not, however, uni-directional, as evidenced by the profound cultural impact of The Arabian Nights, a vast collection of tales from China, Persia, India, Syria, and Egypt. The Arabian Nights has influenced writers throughout the world, including Goethe, Voltaire, Mafouz, and Salman Rushdie.  This course will familiarize students with the vast tradition of fairy tale literature from a variety of time periods and geographical regions and will examine the cross-cultural influences of The Arabian Nights and the western fairy tale.

***This course counts for Literary History and World, please see Dr. Graham for it to show up in your academic requirements***

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