Veggie Tales

A fairy tale is a story featuring folkloric characters such as fairies, goblins, elves, trolls, giants, talking animals and others. These stories often involve royalty, and modern versions usually have a happy ending. more...

Home
Building Toys
Classic Toys
Educational
Electronic, Battery, Wind-Up
Model RR, Trains
Models, Kits
Outdoor Toys, Structures
Pretend Play, Preschool
Puzzles
Radio Control
Robots, Monsters, Space Toys
Stuffed Animals
TV, Movie, Character Toys
Alf
Arthur
Barney
Batman
Bear in the Big Blue House
BeyBlade
Big Comfy Couch
Blues Clues
Bob the Builder
Caillou
California Raisins
Clifford the Big Red Dog
Curious George
Digimon
Disney
Dora the Explorer
Dr. Seuss
Dragon Tales
DragonBall Z
Dukes of Hazzard
ET Extra Terrestrial
Fairly Odd Parents
Family Guy
Flintstones
Futurama
Garfield
Gumby
Hamtaro
Harry Potter
Hello Kitty
Howdy Doody
Invader Zim
Jay Jay the Jet Plane
Jimmy Neutron
Lamb Chop, Shari Lewis
Land Before Time
Lost in Space
Maisy
Munsters
Muppets, Sesame Street
My Little Pony
My Melody, Miffy
Noddy
Other
Peanuts Gang
Pee-Wee Herman
Pokemon
Popeye
Popples
Powerpuff Girls
Rocky & Bullwinkle
Rudolph
Rugrats
Scooby-Doo
Simpsons
Smurfs
South Park
Speed Racer
Spider-Man
Spirit
SpongeBob Squarepants
Strawberry Shortcake
Teletubbies
Theodore Tugboat
Thomas the Tank Engine
Three Stooges
Veggie Tales
Warner Bros.
Wiggles
Winnie the Pooh
Toy Soldiers
Vintage, Antique Toys

In cultures where demons and witches are perceived as real, fairy tales may merge into legendary narratives, where the context is perceived by teller and hearers as having historical actuality. However, unlike legends and epics they usually do not contain more than superficial references to religion and actual places, persons, and events although these allusions are often critical in understanding the origins of these fanciful stories.

Fairy tales are found in oral folktales and in literary form. The history of the fairy tale is particularly difficult to trace, because only the literary forms can survive. Still, the evidence of literary works at least indicates that fairy tales have existed for thousands of years, although not perhaps recognized as a genre; the name "fairy tale" was first ascribed to them by Madame d'Aulnoy. Fairy tales, and works derived from fairy tales, are still written today.

The older fairy tales were intended for an audience of adults as well as children, but they were associated with children as early as the writings of the précieuses, the Brothers Grimm titled their collection Children's and Household Tale, and the link with children has only grown stronger with time.

Folklorists have classified fairy tales in various ways. Among the most notable are the Aarne-Thompson classification, and the morphological analysis of Vladimir Propp. Other folklorists have interpreted the tales' significiance, but no school has been definitively established for the meaning of the tales.

Defining marks

Although the fairy tale is a clearly distinct genre, the definition that marks a work out as a fairy tale is considerable more disputed. Vladimir Propp, in his Morphology of the Folktale, criticized the common distinction between "fairy tales" and "animal tales" on the grounds that many tales contained both fanastic elements and animals. However, to select works for his analysis, he used all Russian folktales classified as Aarne-Thompson 300-749 -- in a cataloguing system that made such a distinction -- to gain a clear set of tales. His own analysis identified fairy tales by their plot elements, but that in itself has been criticized, as the analysis does not lend itself easily to tales such as Rapunzel, which do not involve a quest, and furthermore, the same plot elements are found in non-fairy tale works.

One universally agreed-on definition is that the nature of a tale does not depend on whether fairies appear in it. Many people, including Angela Carter in her introduction to the Virago Book of Fairy Tales have noted that a great deal of so-called fairy tales do not feature fairies at all. This is partly because of the history of the English term "fairy tale" which derives from the French phrase contes de fée which was first used in the collection of Madame D'Aulnoy in 1697. As Stith Thompson and Carter herself point out, talking animals and the presence of magic seem to be more common to the fairy tale than fairies themselves.

Read more at Wikipedia.org