A New Edition of The Classic Fairy Tales Embraces a Global Approach
The Classic Fairy Tales, edited by Maria Tatar, has been one of the required textbooks for our "Introduction to the Fairy Tale" course at Santa Monica College since we first began teaching it over a decade ago. Initially, we taught with the first edition of this collection, and this summer, the third edition was published. Though there are differences between this new edition and the second edition, which we adopted when it came out in 2017, students can use either the second or third edition for our current course.
Tatar debuted Norton Critical Edition of The Classic Fairy Tales in 1999. The changes Tatar has made with each edition are remarkable. There are 120 more pages in the third edition than the first, and this reflects the expansion of fairy tale studies since the turn of the millennium. The additional pages contain more stories that represent a more inclusive canon of fairy tales.
This spring in an online Norton Critical Edition Speaker Series event, Tatar declared: "We are moving from local to global as regards to canon." She has vowed to stop looking at fairy tales as having one standard and hopes to decolonize the fairy-tale canon with this third edition. For example, she used to title each section with Eurocentric names such as "Snow White" and "Cinderella," and those sections are now more inclusivley titled as “The Fairest of Them All” and “Rags to Riches" so that other protagonists from around the world have equal status.
The literary criticism in the third edition has also been edited and expanded to include new approaches to fairy tales such as ecocriticism, queer theory, and, decolonial theory.
Even with these changes, Tatar emphasized in her talk that fairy tales contain elder wisdom. Rather than being an escape, they are a scaffolding of generational knowledge.
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