SOURCE: "The Fairy Tale," in Dickens and the Fairy Tale, Bowling Green University Popular Press, 1972, pp. 7-31

In the essay below, Kotzin recounts the history of the Victorian fairy tale by examining its origins in folklore and German fairy tales and outlining the growth of fantasy as literature.

Fairy tales are perhaps more easily recognized than defined. Folklorists group them with other kinds of folktales, such as animal stories, jests, and fables. They are a type of narrative which has traditionally been told aloud by peoples throughout the world, and although some of the fairy tales in oral traditions have literary sources and many literary versions of the tales have been written, the popular, primitive origins of the fairy-tale genre are often thought of as having determined its character.

The tales get their name from their inclusion of "fairy," but that is a word with more than one...