About the Author

Alan Dundes (1934-2005), was professor of anthropology and folklore at the University of California, Berkeley, and published ten books with the University of Wisconsin Press, including Oedipus, Folk Law, The Cockfight, The Wisdom of Many, The Evil Eye, Cinderella, and The Blood Libel Legend. He is also the author of Parsing through Customs.

Reviews

"Alan Dundes, the prominent psychoanalytical folklorist, offers another tour de force to entertain and educate the scholarly and the lay readership remembering their childhood fascination with bedtime stories. . . . He prefaces each [essay] with superbly informed, insightful, critical commentaries. At the end, Dundes summarizes the results of the interpretations he selected from an astoundingly rich literature, with a survey of Little Red Riding Hood scholarship and his own psychoanalytical decoding of the tale."--Linda Dégh, History of Education Quarterly

"The collection is illuminating and entertaining and could well change one's attitude toward the little girl in the red cap."--Steven Swann Jones, American Anthropologist

"This valuable volume admirably succeeds in its purpose of providing a wide range of historical and interpretive readings that illuminate this most popular of folktales from a number of perspectives. . . . The essays vary in content from several significant contemporary psychoanalytic and feminist critiques by Bruno Bettelheim, Jack Zipes, and Dundes himself to more fanciful pieces on the mythological interpretation of the tale. The book also provides a cross-cultural perspective, which includes the traditional folk-narrative approach of comparing tale variants and analyzing separate motifs for their sociomythical foundations, and a contemporary political analysis." --Choice