Gender Roles in Classical and Contemporary Fairy-Tale

Abstract

This work deals with gender stereotypes expressed through female and male characters in children's books. The first chapter outlines the development of the genre, explaining how it established itself as the normalised canon of children's literature. Furthermore, two approaches to the critical theory of literature are discussed, namely structuralism and feminism, as both play an important role in the research. Last but not least, a large part focuses on the introduction to the field of gender studies, the importance of this problem in literature and particularly in fairy tales. In order to find out how this depiction changed during the evolution of fairy tales, four tales from different periods are analysed here, from the oldest to the modern.