Exhibit: “What Big Eyes You Have! Looking at the Wolf in Fairy Tales”

"What Big Eyes You Have! Looking at the Wolf in Fairy Tales" exhibition, image from "The Fairy Tales of Charles Perrault," illustration by Harry Clarke

“What Big Eyes You Have! Looking at the Wolf in Fairy Tales” exhibition

Portrayed as big, bad and ravenous, the wolf in fairy tales is most often the villain, a beast who tricks and then devours both children and adults before meeting a violent end. “What Big Eyes You Have! Looking at the Wolf in Fairy Tales,” takes a close look at historical depictions of the wolf in well-known and lesser-known fairy tales, drawing from several sources among Special Collections Library materials.

Highlights include early illustrated editions of fairy tales — especially those collected by Charles Perrault and the Grimm Brothers — as well as unusual and visually engaging pop-up, shaped and artists’ books. The variety of books on view, from “Little Red Riding Hood” and “The Three Little Pigs” to lesser-known titles, such as “The Wolf and the Seven Young Kids,” offer a trove of rich imagery for asking what the wolf symbolizes and what our complicated relationship with wolves — both real and imaginary — reveals about our own human nature.

“What Big Eyes You Have! Looking at the Wolf in Fairy Tales” is scheduled for display through Sunday, May 13, in the Eberly Family Special Collections Library Exhibition Room, 104 Paterno Library, on Penn State’s University Park campus.

Read more about the exhibit at Penn State News.