Examines young children's responses to selected fairy tales ("The Three Little Pigs,""The Sleeping Beauty," and "Snow White") presented through oral telling, reading aloud, and television. Concludes that children need to have any danger in the story firmly resolved in the end, and that adults should not soften fairy…

Discusses one seven-year-old girl's responses to three feminist folktales. Finds that for each tale, the girl was drawn to the female protagonist and named her as her favorite character, but the girl did not wish to emulate the female protagonists because of their unconventionality. Suggests that such tales may offer alternative models of female…

A study examines three eight-year-olds' responses to fairy tales, and their perceptions of the tales' meanings. Finds many unique and deeply personal responses, but also finds patterns of response which suggest that adult interpretations of fairy tales are not necessarily the interpretations that children make. (RAE)

Outlined in this paper are the plans for three additional pilot studies to be conducted in Denmark as part of the interdisciplinary Turko-Danish Fairytale Project. The project is concerned with the collective versus the individual nature of reader response to literature and the three pilot studies are: introspection studies during the reading,…

Assembled in the course of the interdisciplinary Turko-Danish Fairytale Project, which examined the nature of collective and individual response to fairytale literature, this bibliography cites materials pertinent to response assessment. Listed by author, the subjects of the approximately 150 titles include language and meaning, poetics, literary…

The theoretical background of the interdisciplinary Turko-Danish Fairytale Project is discussed in this paper. The paper first offers support for the working hypotheses of the Fairytale Project, which was designed to determine (1) if there are aesthetic principles that are universal and that guide the reader's experience of literary works; (2)…

As part of the interdisciplinary Turko-Danish Fairytale Project concerning the nature of response to literature, this paper discusses the rationale, principles, and actual translation procedures behind nine fairytales considered for use in the study. Various sections of the report discuss (1) the texts to be chosen, including their authenticity,…

Prepared as part of the interdisciplinary Turko-Danish Fairytale Project, this paper describes the design of a study intended to discover: (1) if there are aesthetic principles that are universal and that guide readers' experiences of works of literature; (2) whether the principles are built into people by their cultural, economic, and social…

This paper describes the folkloristic and literary theories centered on the traditional narrative that have a bearing on the Turko-Danish Fairytale Project. These theories were incorporated into the Fairytale Project because traditional prose tales (of which the fairy tale is one of the most prominent forms) are a genre that exists in both oral…

Summaries of the Danish internal reports of the essay studies, the introspection studies, and the literary analyses that are part of the larger interdisciplinary Turko-Danish Fairytale Project concerning the collective versus the individual nature of the response to literature are presented in this report. Various sections of the five papers…

This paper presents a brief survey of interdisciplinary Danish studies in experimental reader response since 1965. The paper describes nine projects or studies, including information on their purposes and methods, stages, persons responsible, supporters, funding institutions, internal reports, and publications. Project titles include…

Written literature has evolved over a long period to an entity separate from oral tradition. Written literature aspired to perpetuation, to the creation of written "monuments." This aspiration caused authors to find the means of multiplying authentic versions so that they could popularize their "original" form unchanged. On the…

To put the interdisciplinary Turko-Danish Fairytale Project, which is concerned with the dynamics of reader response to literature, into a theoretical framework, this paper first describes how modern aesthetics take an interdisciplinary approach and investigate--by cross cultural approaches and in human behavior terms--the phenomenon of art and…

A detailed plan for stages one and two of the interdisciplinary Turko-Danish Fairytale Project is presented in this paper and factors considered in the project's research design are discussed in depth. The first section describes the working hypotheses of the project--that there are primordial patterns in the response to literature that are common…

Prepared as part of the interdisciplinary Turko-Danish Fairytale Project, this paper contains descriptions of the core group of readers (600 18-year-old students) and the special groups of readers (each composed of approximately 50 subjects) who participated in the investigation of the collective versus the individual nature of the reader response…