Off with Their Heads! Fairy Tales and the Culture of Childhood

When Hansel and Gretel try to eat the witch's gingerbread house in the woods, are they indulging their "uncontrolled cravings" and "destructive desires" or are they simply responding normally to the hunger pangs they feel after being abandoned by their parents? Challenging Bruno Bettelheim and other critics who read fairy tales as enactments of children's untamed urges, Maria Tatar argues that it is time to stop casting the children as villians. In this provocative book she explores how adults mistreat children, focusing on adults not only as hostile characters in fairy tales themselves but also as real people who use frightening stories to discipline young listeners.

• The Uses of Enchantment: The Meaning and Importance of Fairy Tales
• The Hard Facts of the Grimms' Fairy Tales: Expanded Second Edition
• The Classic Fairy Tales (Norton Critical Editions)
• The Classic Fairy Tales (Second Edition) (Norton Critical Editions)
• Enchanted Hunters: The Power of Stories in Childhood
• The Annotated Classic Fairy Tales
• Fairy Tale as Myth/Myth as Fairy Tale (Clark Lectures)
• My Mother She Killed Me, My Father He Ate Me: Forty New Fairy Tales
• From the Beast to the Blonde: On Fairy Tales and Their Tellers
• Breaking the Magic Spell: Radical Theories of Folk and Fairy Tales