A Child’s Reading of “Cinderella”: Iser’s Act of Reading, Grimm’s “Cinderella” and the Juvenile Reader

Abstract

The paper is an exercise in the Reader Response approach to literature. It applies the German critic Wolfgang Iser’s (1926 – 2007), of the Constance school of reception aesthetics,  theory  as  delineated  in  his magnum-opus The Act of Reading (1978) to the fairy tale of “Cinderella” or “Ashputtel” by the brothers Grimm (1812), to understand how the child reader reads or responds to this seminal work of Children’s Literature. It reaches the conclusion that the reading that Iser describes in his work is that of the adult or the erudite critic, whereas the child reader reads (or responds to literature) rather differently. This different reading of the child’s is not a deficient reading, but simply one of the many ways of responding to a text of literary fiction. The paper argues in favour of recognising the child’s different reading of literature, as this will be an acknowledgement of the child’s intelligence, intentionality, agency and autonomy.