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Print Price: $15.50

Format:
Paperback
416 pp.
129 mm x 196 mm

ISBN-13:
9780199555581

Publication date:
August 2009

Imprint: OUP UK

Selected Tales

Jacob Grimm and Wilhelm Grimm
Translated by Joyce Crick

Series : Oxford World's Classics

'Once upon a time in mid-winter, when the snowflakes were falling from the sky like down, a queen was sitting and sewing at a window ...'

The tales gathered by the Grimm brothers are at once familiar, fantastic, homely, and frightening. They seem to belong to no time, or to some distant feudal age of fairytale imagining. Grand palaces, humble cottages, and the forest full of menace are their settings; and they are peopled by kings and princesses, witches and robbers, millers and golden birds, stepmothers and talking frogs.

Regarded from their inception both as uncosy nursery stories and as raw material for the folklorist the tales were in fact compositions, collected from literate tellers and shaped into a distinctive kind of literature. This new translation mirrors the apparent artlessness of the Grimms, and fully represents the range of less well-known fables, morality tales, and comic stories as well as the classic tales. It takes the stories back to their roots in German Romanticism and includes variant stories and tales that were deemed unsuitable for children. In her fascinating introduction, Joyce Crick explores their origins, and their literary evolution at the hands of the Grimms.

Readership : Suitable for readers and students of classic fairy tales, German literature, comparative literature, German Romanticism, and philology.

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Joyce Crick was, until her retirement, Senior Lecturer in German at University College London. She has translated widely, including texts by Hamann, Herder, Schlegel, Novalis, and Solger. For Oxford World's Classics she has translated Freud's The Interpretation of Dreams and for the new Penguin Freud series, The Joke and Its Relation to the Unconscious. She has edited the German material for the Princeton edition of Coleridge's Notebooks and his translation of Schiller's Wallenstein.

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Special Features

A new translation of Grimms' tales offering a more representative selection of the Tales for Children and the Household than other editions, and including animal fables, tall tales, comic peasant tales, religious magic tales and morality tales.
As well as some seventy-nine tales, including all the well-known fairy tales, the edition also prints earlier versions of some of the famous stories, and stories that were removed after the first edition, to show the stylistic evolution of the stories in their retelling by the Grimms.
The introduction places the work of the Grimms in the literary and historical context of German Romanticism and demonstrates how the brothers edited, refined and adapted tales which were not necessarily taken from the peasant sources they implied.
The edition includes Wilhelm Grimm's preface to the second edition (1819) in which he described their methods of collecting and admitted their intervention, as well as Jacob's Circular Letter with regard to the Collecting of Folk Poesy appealing to other collectors.
Notes identify sources and variants,common motifs and linked tales, and any changes introduced by the Grimms.