Little Red Riding-Hood Research Paper

One of the early forms of the short story is the folk tale or fairy tale, which derives from an oral tradition. “[…] Fairy tale motifs are […] ancient and appear in many pre-Christian epics, poems, myths, fables, histories and religious narratives.” (Zipes, Why Fairy Tales Stick, P 44) Aesop’s fables, for example, have been most popular in the Greece culture since the fifth century before Christ, though they are mere anecdotes with a moral to follow and less short stories like the fairy tale. Fairy tales similar to the ones in the Brothers Grimm’s anthology Children’s and Household Tales or Charles Perrault’s collection Tales of Mother Goose are not proven to have been told at such an early stage in time, however, they were parts of people’s …show more content…
This historical background has effects on the culture and society that was influenced by the stories while simultaneously influencing them themselves and the language in which they were told. With the examples of Little Red Riding-Hood of the seventeenth century in France and Hansel and Gretel of the early nineteenth century in Germany, I am going to demonstrate the impact of fairy tales and how the genre evolved over time.
Charles Perrault was the first author to publish a written version of the oral folk tale of Little Red Riding Hood in the collection Tales of Mother Goose in 1697, one year before the term fairy tale was first used in French Contes de feés by Marie-Catherine D’Aulnoy. With this and Antoine Galland’s translation of the oriental short story Les Mille et une nuit – Arabian Nights began in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth century the tradition of the modern fairy tale in the written form as it is known still to this point in time. Perrault’s version of Little Red Riding-Hood tells the story of a girl who is sent by her mother through the forest to her ill grandmother to bring her bread. In the forest, the girl encounters