Howard, Jennifer. "From 'Once Upon a Time' to 'Happily Ever After.'" CHRONICLE May 22, 2009.

Bottigheimer, Ruth B. Fairy Tales: a New History. Albany: SUNY Press, 2009. Long long ago, villagers and nursemaids spun stories, handing them down from generation to generation. Then collectors like the Brothers Grimm and Charles Perrault came along, jotted them down, and transformed them into literature. That's one old story line about fairy tales. To hear Ruth B. Bottigheimer tell it, that story is itself a fairy tale." It has been said so often that the folk invented and disseminated fairy tales that this assumption has become an unquestioned proposition," Bottigheimer writes in the introduction to her most recent book, Fairy Tales: A New History (State University of New York Press, 2009). "It may therefore surprise readers that folk invention and transmission of fairy tales has no basis in verifiable fact. Literary analysis undermines it, literary history rejects it, social history repudiates it, and publishing history ... contradicts it." . . . Read the rest here: http://chronicle.com/free/v55/i37/37b00601.htm.