Making the fairy tale young once more

In the waning years of the 17th century, just after the aging French writer Charles Perrault published his popular “Tales and Stories of the Past with Morals’’ (subtitled “Tales of Mother Goose’’), the derisive Abbé de Villiers took the opportunity to rip into fairy tales generally, except those of Perrault. “Follies in print,” was Villiers’s description of the genre — “Tales to make you fall asleep on your feet, that nurses have made up to entertain children.”

Since that time, the fairy tale has gained prestige, dignified with the imprimatur of intellectuals including, most famously, psychologists Freud, Jung, and Bruno Bettelheim, as well as a host of other scholars, from Vladimir Propp to Walter Benjamin to Maria Tatar. But it’s the writers who continue to reinvigorate this ancient, rustic genre. Perrault, Hans Christian Andersen, Italo Calvino, Edgar Allan Poe, Oscar Wilde, Anne Sexton, and many more have retold classic stories, and added some frightening and enchanting new tales. Editor Kate Bernheimer’s new collection by contemporary writers, the shiveringly titled “My Mother She Killed Me, My Father He Ate Me,” proves that the fairy tale can still mutate into new, chilling, often humorous forms — though perhaps not as often as Bernheimer would like.