Fairy Tale as Myth/Myth as Fairy Tale

Acknowledgments

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS In preparing this book for publication I have received invaluable support from friends and colleagues. In particular, Cristina Bacchilega and Steven Swann Jones provided many necessary corrections in my critique of folklore scholarship in the Rumpelstiltskin chapter, and Ruth-EllenJoeres was most helpful in refining my feminist perspective. Linda and Jochen Schulte-Sasse offered sound advice about my notion of violation in the introduction and in the Disney chapter and urged me to consider modernism and technology in a more balanced way than my original draft presented. Elizabeth Bell also helped me revise several questionable assertions in this chapter. Some of these chapters were first published as essays in New German Critique, Journal of the Fantastic in the Arts, Journal of Western Folklore, and Children and Their Books and have been extensively revised for this book. Some were presented at conferences such as the lively one held by the International Association for the Fantastic in the Arts or at various universities, and I benefited from the questions and critical points raised by numerous people in discussion sessions. In particular I am very much indebted to Jeannine Blackwell, who invited me to deliver three Thomas D. Clark lectures at the University of Kentucky during the fall of 1993. Thanks to her prompting, I was able to rework my lectures and manuscripts for publication. x.ii ACKNOWLEDGMENTS There are always questions when one talks or writes on fairy tales that can never be totally answered, for they touch our lives in deep and mysterious ways, but I do hope that this book may respond effectively to some of the crucial questions that pertain to the mythical workings of the fairy tale in our own day. ...