Cross listed with WGST 4180/7180-01

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 Anne Sexton, Angela Carter, Margaret Atwood, Toni Morrison, Helen Oyeyemi, and Kelly Link. While women have been the focus of fairy tales since fairy tales were written down they have been obscured as tellers of stories and almost unknown as writers until the late twentieth century and so we will also be examining post-1970s feminist criticism of fairy tales and recovery of women's writing by critics Maria Tatar, Marina Warner, Ruth Bottigheimer, Cristina Bacchilega, and others.