Once upon a time there were two brothers, Jacob and Wilhelm. Jacob trained as a lawyer, but soon found his interests captivated by the past. He followed philosophy and trained himself as a philologist and an antiquarian, trying to define the German people and to trace them back into the long-lost past. With his brother, he documented their language, discovering Grimm’s Law and publishing an enormous encylopedic dictionary that is still used today. 
      His quest for words led him into the world of oral tradition. He documented a number of traditional tales, most famously his Kinder- und Hausmärchen (Children’s and Household Tales), the first folktale texts taken directly from oral tradition. More or less. This, in turn, spawned a whole area of children’s literature in multiple media—his Schneewittchen was the source for Disney’s first full-length animated film, Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs (1939).
      This course explores the works of the Brothers Grimm, with their philosophical roots in the Enlightenment and post-Enlightenment philosophy, their political context in emergent European nationalism in the Napoleonic era, and their intersections with the Romantic movement. We will, of course, be reading fairy tales, but also talking about the process of collection and the production of the tales as we have them, and the uses to which they have been put over the two centuries since their first publication.  

Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm; tr. Jack Zipes. The Original Folk and Fairy Tales of the Brothers Grimm: The Complete First Edition (Princeton University Press)
ISBN: 978-0691173221

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