The Variations in Little Red Riding Hood Essay -- Fairy Tales Literatu

The Variations in Little Red Riding stumblebumFairy tales ar under attack in the United States from twain right- and left-oriented pressure groups. (Ravitch, 62-96) From the left, the charges include sexism, stereotyping, distortion, and anti-humanism. (Ravitch, 84) From the right, the charges include immorality and objections to the portrayal of violence, death, and the supernatural. In addition, more or less critics claim that the tales terrify their children. (Ravitch, 76). In The Language Police, Diane Ravitch claims that both groups understand the grandeur of putting pressure on state textbook adoption committees, and that, as a result of such pressure, most major publishers atomic number 18 hardly dropping the tales from the textbooks they sell to schools. (77-78) Thus parents who assume, or would prefer that, their children are breeding traditional justt tales in school may find themselves mistaken.The unassumingness of the question is itself a matter of bowl ove r, but the biggest problem with the current see is that a fairy tale is assumed to be a fairy tale in the sense that Dickenss A Tale of Two Cities is A Tale of Two Cities. Editors do make some changes in Dickenss text, but essentially what Dickens wrote is what he wrote. This is not the case, however, with fairy tales. There are several, perhaps dozens, of different versions of most of the best-know tales. To argue that tale A is effective or bad, moral or immoral, for children to read is thus comparable to create a house out of straw. One of the central tales in the debate is Little Red Riding poser, and Little Red Riding oaf is assumed to be Little Red Riding Hood. It isnt.There are apparently dozens of versions of this tale, but the best known are those by Charles Perra... .... 28, 2002. ProQuest Direct. Penn. Coll. Lib., Williamsport. 22 August 2004. <http//www.proquest.umi.com/pdqweb.Ravitch, Diane. The Language Police How Pressure Groups Restrict What Students Learn. N.Y. Alfred A. Knopf, 2003.Tatar, Maria. mangle with their Heads Fairy Tales and the Culture of Childhood. Princeton Princeton University Press, 1992.Weldon-Lasiter, Cynthia. Review of Little Red Riding Hood A Newfangled Fairy Tale. Book Links. 114 (Feb/Mar, 2002)11. . ProQuest Direct. Penn. Coll. Kib., Williamsport. 22 August 2004. <http//www.proquest.umi.com/pdqweb. Ziolkowski, Jan. M. A Fairy Tale from before Fairy Tales Egbert of Lieges De puella a lupellis seruata and the Medieval Background of Little Red Riding Hood. Speculum 673 (July 1992) 549-575. JSTOR. Penn. Coll. Kib., Williamsport. 23 July 2004. <http//www.jstor.org.