The Notion “Literary Fairy Tale” and Hans Christian Andersen’s Tales
The Notion “Literary Fairy Tale” and Hans Christian Andersen’s Tales

Summary/Abstract: While fairy tales have enthralled generations of readers and listeners, specialists have a long discussion over defining the genre of the literary fairy tale and identifying its origin and sources. One difficulty is that the term “fairy tale” is applied to both folklore and to an author’s texts because of each features of the “fantastic”, “magic” or “supernatural”. But these words are not concrete notions and could be interpreted very differently. It is doubtful that they can be definitions for the genre, causing some scholars to declare that the literary fairy tale as a genre does not exist. The main aim of this paper is to try to find more objective genres features of this type of literary text, to distinguish them from other literary forms. It is possible to say that the literary fairy tale as a genre was finally formed by Danish author Hans Christian Andersen (1805-1875). While he did not originate the genre, he wrote the most original examples of this new literary form, and he single-handedly established the literary fairy tale as separated from folklore and as a distinct genre of short prose.

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