Teaching Fairy Tales ed. by Nancy L. Canepa (review)

Nancy L. Canepa's Teaching Fairy Tales draws on the experiences of twentyseven professors and scholars of fairy-tale studies across a variety of disciplines who share their syllabi, teaching tips, story choices, and theoretical approaches to teaching fairy tales in an incredibly usable volume. The book is divided into two main parts: "Foundations of Fairy-Tale Studies" and the much longer "Teaching and Learning with Fairy Tales." Both of these parts function to deepen the reader's understanding of fairy tales while also providing practical, innovative methods for teaching the genre.

After an insightful introductory chapter by the editor, the first section, encompassing around sixty pages, provides an overview of the theory of fairy-tale studies, beginning with Maria Tatar's answer to the foundational question, "what is a fairy tale?" Graham Anderson presents a look at the prehistory of fairy tales, segueing into Jack Zipes's focus on the fairy tale's development in Europe and North America. Donald Haase closes this section with his observations on the idea of a fairy-tale canon. These chapters could be used as assigned readings in class or could serve as vital background information before beginning to teach a course.

The rest of the book is geared toward just that—teaching fairy tales. The second part of the book is divided into seven sections that encompass a variety of approaches to pedagogy. Each of these sections provides lesson plans, book selections, sample classroom discussions, and innovative methodology for integrating fairy tales into a wide variety of disciplines. For those who feel frustrated that they cannot teach a full course on fairy tales, these sections also spark ideas for units or even individual classroom lessons that could incorporate fairy-tale texts.

Monster bridegrooms, wishing stories (ATU 555), and embedded narratives comprise the topics for the first section, "Fairy Tales and Tale Types." Each of the chapters presents a blend of the theoretical and practical in their discussion of the topic. All of the authors describe how they conduct their discussions, such as "First, I ask students…," giving readers a clear path to follow if they wish to emulate this lesson. Anne Duggan's "Monster Bridegroom" chapter includes multiple appendices of student handouts, essay prompts, and lecture notes, thus making the information even more mutable to one's own classroom experience. This pattern of helpful sharing of materials continues throughout the book.

In "Fairy Tales in Context," the context in question is a historical one. Each of the four chapters places the tales in their formative locations: a general European context, a more specific French and Italian historical context, and French salon culture. Jennifer Schacker closes the section with a discussion of how Frank L. Baum's The Wonderful Wizard of Oz (1900) helps students with "analyzing and historicizing the metacommunicative dimensions of tales … and related paratexts" (174). These chapters include full-color maps and photos of artwork, historical commentary, and classroom discussion prompts. For those who do not have a background in European history, this section forms the basis for a deeper understanding of the time period in which Madame d'Aulnoy and Giambattista Basile wrote their tales. The works cited after each chapter provide further reading for those who want to explore historical methodology in more detail.

However, a historical approach is only one way of looking at the genre, and the five chapters in "Teaching New Scholarly Approaches to Fairy Tales" provide instructional support for using various methodologies. women's studies and disability studies provide two lenses in this section for interpreting fairy tales. Maria Nikolajeva introduces the idea of using the cognitive–affective approach to explore "how texts stimulate recipients' perception, attention, imagination, prediction, retrospection, memory, and other cognitive activity" (196) and introduces a classroom activity with questions to guide students through these interesting perspectives on the tales many students think they understand explicitly. Using adaptations and translations of fairy tales and discussing how they fit into a "web" of related tales rounds out...