Board Thread:Fanon Discussion/@comment-24185671-20140903034328/@comment-4598697-20140906012327

I noticed that most of the children's novels and nursery rhymes accepted on this wiki are in the public domain. Alice in Wonderland has been public domain for years.

Early fairy tales tend to surpass the Grimms in violence. Some of the stories by Giambattista Basile are incredibly violent even by fairy tale standards (google Sun, Moon, and Talia). Many old French fairy tales are extremely violent too. Some even have sexual content.

There seem to be two main types of fairy tales: literary and oral.

Literary fairy tales include the fairy tales of Charles Perrault, Madame d'Aulnoy, and Hans Christian Andersen. These tend to be longer. Madame d'Aulnoy has several fairy tales over 10,000 words in length - Princess Belle-Etoile, her longest fairy tale, is over 18,000 words long. The writing tends to be ornate, the characters often have names, and there is a lot of dialogue.

Oral fairy tales include the fairy tales of the Brothers Grimm and many of the fairy tales in Andrew Lang's Fairy Books. These tend to be shorter (some Brothers Grimm stories are less than 1,000 words) and feature nameless characters and the writing is more plain and simple. Dialogue is infrequent.

The literary fairy tale genre was led by women in France. Both women and men contributed many great literary fairy tales. (The ones written by women tend to have more active female characters than the ones written by men - compare Perrault's heroines to d'Aulnoy's heroines and you'll see what I'm talking about.) Most oral fairy tale collectors seem to have been male. There were some female oral fairy tale collectors, though, such as Laura Gonzenbach, who collected Sicilian fairy tales.

The association with children developed over time. Madame d'Aulnoy, who coined the term fairy tale, wrote her fairy tales for adults. The first fairy tale writer who wrote for children seems to have been Jeanne-Marie Leprince Le Beaumont, who is best known for her version of Beauty and the Beast (Disney based their version on hers - of course, they took lots of creative liberties). It seems that the Victorians were the ones who firmly cemented this idea. Madame d'Aulnoy's works were especially hard hit, since Victorians often associated women writers with children's literature.

Another thing to know about fairy tales is that they are generally secular. There are exceptions, such as many of Hans Christian Andersen's stories, as well as Mary's Child by the Brothers Grimm, which make references to Christianity, and a number of Arabian Nights stories that make references to Islam.