Violence in Fairy Tales

The biggest advice I have for everyone is to start early. I know you will probably hear it from everyone else in the class. We all have pulled a good grade on an essay we wrote the night before, but that is not something you can do with this paper. The amount of time it took me to find my sources was much longer than I expected. I went into the paper thinking that I can just type "violence in fairy tales" in Google and hundreds of answers will be right in front of me. Of course I got nothing but pages of sites that sell essays on fairy tales. The first way you should try to get sources is by using the library databases of JSTOR and Project Muse. I would also recommend, depending on your topic to try other databases besides English, I myself used the psychology category database as well. I also received a lot of help from my peer review group. (Thank You Guys!!) I got the advice to read the articles and books in the works cited of the few journals I already had. This was very helpful and allowed me to gather the rest of the sources I needed. I was also in the peer review group which was the one with no one having a similar topic. So if you are lucky enough to get into a peer review group with similar topics, don't think of it as an easy day for 10 points, but try to get as much information as you can and share sources.

The topic of my research paper was violence in fairy tales and I wanted to answer the question why is society entertained by the violent element in them and is it really a bad thing if we are? The sources I found useful were:

* "The Witch Must Die: The Hidden Meaning of Fairy Tales" by Sheldon Cashdan (library)

* "The Uses of Enchantment: The Meaning and Importance of Fairy Tales" Bruno Bettelheim (library)

* "Violence and Fear in Folktales" by David Boudinot (JSTOR)

*"Off with their Heads!: Fairy Tales and the Culture of Childhood" by Maria Tatar (library)

As you can see the most useful sources are books from the library.

In conclusion:

Start Early + Actually Spend Time On Your Topic Decision + Use Sources From The Library = Party One Week Earlier Than Everyone Else In Class