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This article is a response to criticisms of my thesis that Giovanni Francesco Straparola invented the rise fairy-tale plotline in 1550s Venice. In order to clarify and support the argument that I made in my 2002 book, Fairy Godfather, I here make efforts toward establishing a common terminology, critiquing the parameters of Proppian structural analysis, and revising the trope of women-as-storytellers. I affirm the importance of sociohistorical studies of publishing, editing, and patterns of literacy for understanding the emergence and spread of rise fairy tales. I refute arguments for the existence of rise fairy tales in the ancient world and in the Middle Ages. In addition, I offer further explanations of how print technology, widespread schooling, and economic change brought about the emergence of rise fairy tales in Renaissance Venice, and to account for the post-1789 spread of rise fairy tales among European and non-European populations, I cite increasing literacy in rural areas. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Against Ruth B. Bottigheimer's argument that the sixteenth-century Italian author Giovanni Francesco Straparola originated fairy tale in its best-known form, this article maintains that ancient and medieval texts contain earlier literary adaptations of folktales that qualify as fairy tales. Particular attention is paid to similarities between Straparola's "Il re porco" and the Medieval Latin Asinarius. Such affinities suggest that oral tradition is not as difficult to document before the print era as Bottigheimer asserts. With regard to her theory that Straparola invented the narrative pattern that she calls "rise tales," this article offers evidence that one such tale may be found as early as the second century CE, in Apuleius's famous "Cupid and Psyche." In the nineteenth and twentieth centuries folklorists were deeply concerned with studying the distribution of folktales across space and time; their key preoccupations were questions about origins and about the relationship between orality and literacy. These issues deserve to retain a central place in folklore studies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Inspired by Ruth Bottigheimer's 2002 book, Fairy Godfather: Straparola, Venice, and the Fairy Tale Tradition, this article examines her proposition that the sixteenth-century Italian author Giovanni Francesco Straparola invented the "rise tale," in which a lowly hero or heroine climbs the socioeconomic ladder with the help of a magical benefactor. It investigates Bottigheimer's evidence for this claim as well as her argument that Straparola's literary invention was a projection of the emerging Italian middle class in the sixteenth century. Contrary to Bottigheimer's proposition, it is found that tales with similar form were told in classical Greece and in medieval Europe and that the belief in magical fairies was known in Europe long before Straparola's time. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Ruth B. Bottigheimer has contended that a specific literary man invented the fairy-tale genre less than five centuries ago. This article is a critical examination of her claim. It interrogates the axioms underlying Bottigheimer's proposition, probes the logical consistency of her account, and surveys Bottigheimer's use of empirical evidence. It concludes that while Bottigheimer's proposition is a healthy challenge to folklorists who would disregard literary texts as a matter of principle, her assumptions, reasoning, and conclusions leave much to be desired. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

"Juan Oso," known as "John the Bear" in the English tradition, is a cohesive narrative, a tale type, with apparent European origins and wide distribution among native communities of the Americas. Here I inspect the thesis that the native American narrative corpus originates in European sources. "Juan Oso" would seem to be the poster child for this argument, but after considering its presence in two New World collections, Robert Lowie's Assiniboine myths and my own Kamsá mythic narratives, I propose that "Juan Oso" is an outlier, a special case, in an endemic American corpus of tales featuring amorous bears. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The legend of the Jewish holy virgin of Ludmir originated in the nineteenth-century Hasidic world in Eastern Europe. Employing the tools used in the study of folk literature in general and the folk legend in particular the article concentrates on genre analysis and an attempt to learn from the story about the storytelling society, its problems, and aspirations. By focusing on whether the story of the Maid of Ludmir is a Hasidic "shevaḥ" (a Hasidic saints' legend) about a female "ẓaddiq," the article pinpoints the importance of the folkloristic perspective to cultural research of the Jewish society. From the contextual notes that accompany some of the transcriptions of the legend we learn that women were the bearers of the narrative tradition about the Maid of Ludmir. The analysis shows that the ambiguity toward women may be one of the factors that produced the story of the Maid of Ludmir as a combined shevaḥ and anti-shevaḥ that express the problematics of women in the Hasidic world. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Interprets the "Dwarf and the Giant" (AT 327B) tale in Africa and the Middle East. Defining elements for AT 327B; Comparison between the application of the tale in Europe and in Africa and in the Middle East; Similarity of several African tales and European tales; Other examples of AT 327B outside Europe; Historic dimension of historic-geographic folk tale studies.

The article presents a report on a conference on narratives of causation in folk literature, held in Paris, France, from October 4-6, 2012. Topics of discussion included different genres of European folk tales and legends, common themes and motifs of folk literature, and etiological tales in the Bible.