We might think of fairy tales as comforting childhood stories but women have been using them to think about, criticize, and subvert their circumstances, producing both fantasies and anti-fantasies, since at least the seventeenth century. This course looks at that tradition in women's writing through the emergence of the literary fairy tale in French, German, and British women's writing from the seventeenth to the nineteenth centuries, the influence of the "classical" French and German fairy tale tradition in Anglophone women's writing in the nineteenth century, and rewritings of fairy tales in contemporary fiction by women, including Angela Carter, The Bloody Chamber (1979), Margaret Atwood, Blind Assassin (2001), Toni Morrison, God Help the Child (2016), and Helen Oyeyemi, Gingerbread (2020). While women and girls have been the focus of fairy tales since stories were written down they have been obscured as tellers of stories and almost unknown as writers until the late twentieth century, so we will also be examining post-1970s feminist criticism of fairy tales and recovery of women's writing by Maria Tatar, Marina Warner, Ruth Bottigheimer, and Cristina Bacchilega. Assignments include a weekly discussion board, mid-term and final examinations, and two critical analysis papers.