Contents of
Vol. 21, No. 1 (2007)

Contents

Editorial Policy

Guidelines for Submission

Preface to the Special Issue on Fairy Tales, Printed Texts, and Oral Tellings

Ruth B. Bottigheimer

ARTICLES

The Relationship between Oral and Literary Tradition as a Challenge in Fairy-Tale Research: The Case of Finnish Folktales

Satu Apo

The question of the relationship between oral and literary fairy-tale traditions is linked to a number of theoretical discussions in the study of folklore--for example, the origin of the genre, the history of particular tales, and the authenticity of folklore. These questions have also been addressed from cultural historical perspectives, analyzing the contexts in which fairy tales became literary works in different centuries. What is more, the ethnography of reading and writing has raised some new questions about how folk narrators gained access to written fairy tales and the extent of literacy in different European countries in the nineteenth century when the great majority of tales were recorded. To judge from existing Finnish folktale collections, there have been several types of narrators: oral and illiterate; narrators who could read but who performed their tales orally; and narrators who were able to re-create their favorite fairy tales in writing. The author examines these questions using Finnish folktale versions of “Beauty and the Beast.”

On the Literary Origins of Folkloric Fairy Tales: A Comparison between Madame d’Aulnoy’s “Finette Cendron” and Frank Bourisaw’s “Belle Finette”

Charlotte Trinquet

Mme d’Aulnoy’s “Finette Cendron” underlies an American oral telling, “Belle Finette.” Since no trace of the tale in this form exists in French oral tradition, the author speculates that still-undocumented chapbooks, together with motifs familiar from other Western European fairy tales provided the raw material for its Missouri teller.

The Transformation of Folktales and Fairy Tales into Popular Booklets

Maria Kaliambou

Greek popular booklets of tales constitute a previously neglected but important research subject for folktale and popular literature. They first appeared in the late nineteenth century and since then have been a steady part of the Greek publishing agenda. The analysis of the texts included in the booklets has shown both free transformation as well as faithful transformation as the tales passed into popular tale forms.

A Prologue Tale as Manifesto Tale: Establishing a Narrative Literary Form and the Formation of Arabian Nights

Abd-El-Hameed Hawwas

A little-known and rarely reproduced tale from the Bulaq edition of Arabian Nights offers insight into storytelling conditions that are contemporaneous with the formation of the Nights. The tale describes various kinds of stories and functions as a manifesto concerning the social value of storytellers, while its content analysis confirms the place of the Nights within written transmission traditions.

Postulated Routes from Naples to Paris: The Printer Antonio Bulifon and Giambattista Basile’s Fairy Tales in Seventeenth-Century France

Suzanne Magnanini

A vast network of correspondence linking French and Italian intellectuals in the seventeenth century reveals three distinct routes by which Giambattista Basile’s Lo cunto de li cunti could have arrived in France in the 1680s. Each route begins with Antonio Bulifon (1649-1707), a French printer working in Naples who printed an edition of Basile’s fairy tales in 1674. In the first scenario, the Benedictine monk and renowned scholar Jean Mabillon purchases a copy of Lo cunto while visiting Bulifon’s bookshop during his book-buying mission for Louis XIV in 1685. In the second, Mabillon orders the other copies of Lo cunto after his return to Paris in 1686. In the third, Bulifon carries the tales to France himself when he returns to conduct business in 1687. Many other plausible routes of transmission still remain to be investigated.

New Poetics versus Old Print: Fairy Tales, Animal Fables, and the Gaulois Past

Sophie Raynard

Marie-Jeanne Lhéritier's dedications and frame-tale discussions show her carefully crafting moral fairy-tale texts as part of the Moderns’ cultural agenda. Despite the degree to which her thinking, and to a certain extent, that of Mme d’Aulnoy, overlapped with that of the Abbé de Villiers, he excoriated all fairy tales except those of Charles Perrault. Underlying all three authors’ arguments is a sense of fairy tales as literary texts rather than as cultural patrimony.

Does Sex Breed Gender? Pronominal Reference in the Grimms’ Fairy Tales

Orrin W. Robinson

Among the editorial changes the Brothers Grimm (especially Wilhelm) made to previously published sources for their tales, as well as to successive editions of their own tales, were a number of purely linguistic, even grammatical ones. This article studies the tales' use of the personal pronouns (neuter) "es" and (feminine) "sie" in reference to girls. While some correlation can be demonstrated with equally neuter or feminine nouns being used for them, in general the pronouns reflect personal characteristics of the referents, including especially sexual availability and goodness/badness.

SCHOLARSHIP IN TRANSLATION

Semiliterate and Semi-Oral Processes

Rudolf Schenda / Translated by Ruth B. Bottigheimer

The author argues that the widespread conviction that oral sources for fairy tales preceded written fairy tales grows from regressive argumentation. Oral tellings develop in conjunction with print and school culture. This is especially true of fairy tales and is well documented in travel literature and in memoirs.

TEXTS & TRANSLATIONS

The Prologue Tale

Edward Lane

Reviews

Critical Exchanges