Aphorisms and fairy tales
Aphorisms and fairy tales.In addition to the numerous literary adaptations of fairy tales in the form of prose works, poems, and plays, there also exists a tradition of reducing well‐known tales to short aphorisms of a few lines. These aphorisms allude to fairy tales in general or to specific tales and their individual motifs. These allusions can be found not only among the aphorisms of highly intellectual authors but also among the anonymous one‐liners of modern graffiti. They represent remnants of the original fairy tales and form a small sub‐genre of the aphorism and might be labelled as fairy‐tale aphorisms.
One of the earliest aphorisms of this type is Johann Wolfgang von Goethe's somewhat paradoxical text ‘Fairy tale: indicating to us the possibility of impossible occurrences under possible or impossible conditions’. The reactions of later authors to fairy tales in general or specific motifs...
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