ABSTRACT

Notwithstanding the impact of fairy-tale films and oral storytelling, most of us will probably have had formative early experiences of reading fairy tales in print. Though the assumption that there is a quasi-natural transition from the oral transmission of fairy tales to their subsequent collection in printed volumes has been radically challenged, others have rallied in support, for example arguing that the very dichotomy of folklore versus individual authorship in print, far from being a natural opposition, was actually created at a particular historical moment: the Romantic inauguration of the author as solitary genius. Print remains the crucial venue for constructing and sharing fairy-tale scholarship. Rather than working to patrol borders between oral and print tale telling, scholars, writers, readers, and viewers benefit from the historical and contemporary continuum that is the heritage of this storytelling.