Fairy Tales for Today

There are a number of different ways that writers work with fairy tales today. We’ve seen many of them in the last module. Over the course of this module, you’ll see other approaches to fairy tales for the modern world.

The majority of you were interested in spending more of this unit looking at Neil Gaiman’s Coraline. Gaiman is a prolific writer of stories that are heavily influenced by fairy tales. He has written for all ages and across a variety of genres and mediums. Today, he is probably the most well-known and award-winning writer of new literary fairy tales.

Neil Gaiman’s poem recited in the video below speaks to the kind of rules that we understand to exist when it comes to the world of the fairy tale. 

Watch: “Instructions” a Neil Gaiman Poem

Before diving into Coraline and the dark fairy tale worlds of Neil Gaiman, let’s explore a bit more about how books are geared to what ages and some of the other kinds of modern fairy tales being produced today.