Colloquially, the term "fairy tale" or "fairy story" can also mean any far-fetched story or tall tale; it is used especially of any story that not only is not true, but could not possibly be true.

Once Upon a Time: A Short History of Fairy Tale - Marina Warner Once Upon a Time: A Short History of Fairy Tale - Marina Warner

A common comic motif is a world where all the fairy tales take place, and the characters are aware of their role in the story, [99] such as in the film series Shrek.Other fairy tales, such as The Story of the Youth Who Went Forth to Learn What Fear Was, do not feature the donor. In the long-distant days of yore, when haystacks winnowed sieves, when genies played jereed in the old bathhouse, [when] fleas were barbers, [when] camels were town criers, [and when] I softly rocked my baby grandmother to sleep in her creaking cradle, there was/lived, in an exotic land, far, far away, a/an. His big jaws clamped down on nothing but air and the two little pigs scrambled away as fast as their little hooves would carry them.

Once upon a time - Wikipedia Once upon a time - Wikipedia

Fairy tales appear, now and again, in written literature throughout literate cultures, [a] [b] as in The Golden Ass, which includes Cupid and Psyche ( Roman, 100–200 AD), [40] or the Panchatantra ( India 3rd century BC), [40] but it is unknown to what extent these reflect the actual folk tales even of their own time. Each drawing is by a different illustrator in a different style that reflects the story but also the public persona of the narrator. They are the "purest and simplest expression of collective unconscious psychic processes" and "they represent the archetypes in their simplest, barest and most concise form" because they are less overlaid with conscious material than myths and legends. Other folklorists have explained the figure of the wicked stepmother in a historical/sociological context: many women did die in childbirth, their husbands remarried, and the new stepmothers competed with the children of the first marriage for resources. The Aarne-Thompson-Uther classification system and the morphological analysis of Vladimir Propp are among the most notable.Magic, friendship, and adventure come together in the adorable Once Upon a Fairy Tale series, featuring black-and-white illustrations on every page. K. Chesterton argued that "Fairy tales, then, are not responsible for producing in children fear, or any of the shapes of fear; fairy tales do not give the child the idea of the evil or the ugly; that is in the child already, because it is in the world already. MacDonald incorporated fairytale motifs both in new literary fairy tales, such as The Light Princess, and in works of the genre that would become fantasy, as in The Princess and the Goblin or Lilith. Once upon a time, there was a little girl living with her mom in a small thatched hut in a deserted hamlet. In this evolution, the name was coined when the précieuses took up writing literary stories; Madame d'Aulnoy invented the term Conte de fée, or fairy tale, in the late 17th century.