Volume 22, Issue 1 (2008) Erotic Tales

From the Editors

The immediate impetus for publishing a special issue on erotic fairy tales came from a panel devoted to that topic at the 2005 annual meeting of the American Folklore Society (AFS). The four panelists who organized that session—Jeana Jorgensen, Sarah Lash, Linda J. Lee, and Adam Zolkover—were responding to a state of affairs that Jorgensen has recently articulated in an encyclopedia entry on “Erotic Tales”: “Although there is a wealth of scholarship available on fairy tales, little of it pertains explicitly to sexual identities and relations, despite the fact that erotic tales have long played a significant role in the literary tradition” (The Greenwood Encyclopedia of Folktales and Fairy Tales, ed. Donald Haase [Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 2008] 1: 306).