| Grimm's Fairy Tales is the greatest children's literature in the nineteenth century.It takes the famous linguists Brothers Grimm nearly three decades to collect various fairy tales. It is a book that has been translated for most times except the Bible, and is also the most popular in the world. Thus it is called the children's Bible and is regarded as the enlightenment of man's childhood. As a shining pearl of the German folk literature, Grimm's Fairy Tales is the product of Romanticism and the literalization of religious theology. Almost all the fairy tales around the world have similar images and themes with Grimm's Fairy Tales. It can be said that Grimm's Fairy Tales is the origin of future fairy tales.Grimm's Fairy Tales is always the favorite book of children in different eras, in different nations and children of different educational backgrounds. Through wonderful fantasies and exaggerated narration, Grimm Brothers praise the good and castigate the evil in order to express children's longings for good things. With adults' ardent expectations and intensive care to children conveyed in it, Grimm's Fairy Tales is the best gift dedicated by Brothers Grimm to the children of the world.With Grimm's Fairy Tales as the studying object, this thesis tries to reveal the guiding function of the fairy tales to the formation of children's concepts of good and evil by analyzing the three types of images in Grimm's Fairy Tales. This thesis argues that the development of children's rationality is a dynamic process and the formation of children's concepts of good and evil is a process initiated gradually. The three types of images in Grimm's Fairy Tales corresponds exactly to the three stages of the development of children's concepts of rationality, good and evil.This thesis is divided into three parts. By analyzing the inhuman beast images in Grimm's Fairy Tales, the first part reveals that the evolution from animal to man is human being's first selection, the biological selection. New-born babies, with only perception and immature rationality, don't have the ability to distinguish themselves from animals. Therefore, the images of the beasts is needed to help children get the difference between man and beast, to form rationality in children, and to help them to know themselves and human beings. The second part of this thesis starts from the analysis of the inhuman half-beast images in Grimm's Fairy Tales and tries to solve the Sphinx Riddle, which is the second selection in the history of human being's development, namely, the ethical selection. Through family education, children begin to have rationality and the concept of the difference between man and beast, but they still can not make a clear distinction between animality and humanlity. The inhuman half-beast images thus represents children's immature awareness of rationality. Through the analysis of the human images in Grimm's Fairy Tales, the third part reveals that people exist as a sphinx factor which is combined by human factor and animal factor. Along with the growth of age and family education, children begin to have rational factors and can distinguish good from evil, but still do not know how to make right choices.The typical examples of good, evil and half-good-half-evil images and the endings of what goes around comes around in the fairy tales teach our children how to make right ethical choices. |
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