alma matter matters

Someone from SUNY Stony Brook disputes the history of the fairy tale. From Shelf Awareness: Once upon a time everyone believed that fairy tales were handed down through an oral tradition, but the  Ruth B. Bottigheimer, a professor at Stony Brook University, disputes this idea.

"It has been said so often that the folk invented and disseminated fairy tales that this assumption has become an unquestioned proposition," Bottigheimer wrote in her new book, Fairy Tales: A New History. "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 (whether of manuscripts or of books) contradicts it."