PAWcast: Maria Tatar *71 on the Scholarship of Fairy Tales and Folklore

Princeton Alumni Weekly Podcasts

Our guest this month is Maria Tatar, the John L. Loeb Research Professor of Germanic Languages and Literatures and of Folklore and Mythology at Harvard University. Maria, who received her Ph.D. from Princeton in 1971, has recently published a book, Fairest of the Them All: Snow White and 21 Tales of Mothers and Daughters, which explores Disney’s Snow White and all of the Snow White-esque folklore found in cultures across the globe. Tatar shifted the focus of her scholarship to folklore in the 1980s and was one of the first American scholars to seriously study fairy tales and folklore. Maria discusses why the theme of mother-daughter jealousy has proved to be so universal, and why fairy tales are retold in new ways with each generation.