Rosemary
Lake
Registered User
(7/2/05 9:24 pm)
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Grimms et al as inventors of format?
Just ran across this
www.pupress.princeton.edu...i7198.html
Twice upon a Time: Women Writers and the History of the Fairy Tale by Elizabeth Wanning Harries
All I've seen is the Introduction, which is all Princeton seems to offer on the net. A few screens down, she defines two modes of story: 'compact' (eg Grimm, Perrault) and 'complex' (eg Cabinet des Fees and some short "chilling" stories that "insist that their audiences constantly keep 'compact' or 'traditional' or 'classic' versions in mind as they read").
I do like her choosing descriptive terms here, 'compact' vs 'complex' -- rejecting terms like 'traditional', 'postmodern', and 'performance'.
However I wonder what the historians here think about her idea that the Grimms (and perhaps other collectors?) "were really shaping [stories] into a style that they themselves had invented as particularly appropriate for their Märchen." I don't want to summarize any more, but it would be interesting to see people's comments on the site, and on the book itself.
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