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Dealing with the most translated work of German literature, the Tales of the brothers Grimm (1812-1815), this book discusses their history, notably in relation to Denmark and subsequently other nations from 1816 to 1986. The Danish intelligentsia responded enthusiastically to the tales and some were immediately translated into Danish by a nobleman and by the foremost Romantic poet. Their renditions remained in print for a century and embued the tales with high prestige. This book discusses translators, approaches, and other parameters such as copyright, and changes in target audiences. The tales' social acceptability inspired Hans Christian Andersen to write his celebrated fairytales. Combined, the Grimm and Andersen tales came to constitute the 'international fairytale'.This genre was born in processes of translation and, today, it is rooted more firmly in the world of translation than in national literatures. This book thus addresses issues of interest to literary, cross-cultural studies and translation.

Can the study of folklore survive brutal wars and nationalized misappropriations? Does folklore make sense in an age of fearsome technology? These are two of several questions this book addresses with specific and profound reference to the history of folklore studies in Germany. There in the early nineteenth century in the ideological context of romantic nationalism, the works of the Brothers Grimm pioneered the discipline. The sublimation of folklore studies with the nation's political history reached a peak in the 1930s under the Nazi regime. This book takes a full look at what happened to folklore after the end of World War II and the defeat of the Nazis. A special focus on Lutz Röhrich (1923-2006), whose work spans the decades from 1955 to 2006, makes this book a unique window into a monumental reclamation. In 1945 Röhrich returned from the warfront at the age of twenty-three, a wounded amputee. Resuming his education, he published his seminalMärchen und Wirklichkeit (Folktale and Reality)in 1956. Naithani argues that through this and a huge body of scholarship on folktale, folksong, proverbs, and riddles over the next decades, Röhrich transformed folklore scholarship by critically challenging the legacies of Romanticism and Nazism in German folklore work. Sadhana Naithani's book is the first full-length treatment of this extraordinary German scholar written in English.

Germany has had a profound influence on English stories for children. The Brothers Grimm, The Swiss Family Robinson and Johanna Spyri’s Heidi quickly became classics but, as David Blamires clearly articulates in this volume, many other works have been fundamental in the development of English children’s stories during the 19th century and beyond. Telling Tales is the first comprehensive study of the impact of Germany on English children’s books, covering the period from 1780 to the First World War. Beginning with The Adventures of Baron Munchausen, moving through the classics and including many other collections of fairytales and legends, it covers a wealth of translated and adapted material.

The mythological patrimony is an excellent example of the unconscious creative ability that brings reason both to the existence of myth as well as to its symbolic function. Reconsidering the connection between literature and psychoanalysis, this study starts from the Jungian archetypal theory up to the Freudian unconscious and its ability to produce symbols, and provides the tools for a reading of the phenomenon of the literary rework, in the modern age, of meaningful themes and mythological.

How can one read song? Reading is silent, introspective, and singular; singing is audible, performative, and plural. In his folksong collections, Johann Gottfried Herder acknowledges this dualism and favors song. Yet he asks his readers to navigate the divide nonetheless—to read song. This article seeks to understand the meaning of this apparent contradiction by investigating the evidence at the scene of reading to argue two points. First, that the social history of readers and reading can allow us to understand both the relationship between voice and writing in the late eighteenth century and, subsequently, illuminate why Herder put so much energy into a philosophic play with this boundary. Second, that the subsequent history of the folksong in the hands of later collectors and composers differs significantly from Herder's conception of the genre.

By the early middle ages vernacular aristocratic traditions of heroic narration were firmly established in Western and Northern Europe.Although there are regional, linguistic and formal differences, one can observe a number of similarities.Oral literature disseminates a range of themes that are shared by narratives in most parts of the continent.

Despite popular opinions of the 'dark Middle Ages' and a 'gloomy early modern age,' many people laughed, smiled, giggled, chuckled, entertained and ridiculed each other. This volume demonstrates how important laughter had been at times and how diverse the situations proved to be in which people laughed, and this from late antiquity to the eighteenth century. The contributions examine a wide gamut of significant cases of laughter in literary texts, historical documents, and art works where laughter determined the relationship among people. In fact, laughter emerges as a kaleidoscopic phenomenon reflecting divine joy, bitter hatred and contempt, satirical perspectives and parodic intentions. In some examples protagonists laughed out of sheer happiness and delight, in others because they felt anxiety and insecurity. It is much more difficult to detect premodern sculptures of laughing figures, but they also existed. Laughter reflected a variety of concerns, interests, and intentions, and the collective approach in this volume to laughter in the past opens many new windows to the history of mentality, social and religious conditions, gender relationships, and power structures.

Whether forced upon the Biya regime or granted willingly as the fallouts of the general clamor for change, freedom of speech and association with related press liberation had accompanying issues that remarkably influenced life patterns in Cameroon. [...]besides multiparty politics that offered Cameroonians alternative political platforms from which to advertise, demonstrate, as well as implement alternative political ideologies, the 1990 law on freedom of association, midwifed the birth to civil society organizations strong enough the cause the Biya regime restlessness and sleepless nights. [...]the likes of Nico Mbarga, the Nigerian-Cameroonian, in such products as Happy Birth Day and Sweet Mother quickly gave way to the likes of Awilo de Bamenda in Country Don Spoil (2006) and Lapiro de Mbanga's Na You, Lefam So and Constitution Constipé (2011) and others. Popular culture as a cry of despair and socio-political criticism Although popular cultural production in Cameroon is considered an open platform for the articulation of personal as well and collective issues of concern, the noble mission of criticism with the objective of ameliorating standards cannot be over emphasised. [...]the production, and above all, consumption of popular production is predetermined by the inherent values and ideological inclinations of the artist vis-à-vis the socio-political climate. Like literary analysts, historical chroniclers, social observers and politico-economic supervisors, the Cameroonian pop artist engages a holistic evaluation of the community, not only as a duty but also an obligation that admits no exemption. [...]the pop artist, be they Longué Longué, Prince Panya, Benji Mateke, Awilo de Bamenda, Saint Bruno or Afo-Akom, does not really create anything new but simply gives back in an orderly manner what they take from society in a disorderly way.

This article questions the formative role that Bertolt Brecht is regarded to have had on Algerian writer Kateb Yacine's political theater in the 1970s and 80s. While Brecht did indeed play an important role in Algerian theater in the post-independence era, the assumption that he singularly shaped political theatrical forms in Algeria masks the particular trajectory of Kateb's work. Focusing specifically on his play Mohamed prends ta valise, this essay revisits the broad historical and political contexts of Kateb's theater to underscore the particularity of his practice after 1971 and to broaden the limiting analytic frames that cast his work in Brechtian terms. Attending to the important influence of local folk forms and Marxism-Leninism on Kateb's practice, I call attention to both the multiple vectors that shaped his work and further question the flattening effect of metropolitan theater histories that decontextualize Brechtian practice as they ascribe influence.

Reading Riddles: Rhetorics of Obscurity from Romanticism to Freud explores how the riddle becomes a figure for reading and writing in early German Romanticism and how this model then enables Sigmund Freud's approach to the psyche. It traces a migration of ideas from literature to psychoanalysis and argues that the relationship between them must be situated at the methodological level. Through readings of texts by August Wilhelm, Friedrich Schlegel, G.W.F. Hegel, and Ludwig Tieck Reading Riddles documents how the Romantics expand the field of poetic signification to include obscure, distorted signs and how they applied this rhetoric of obscurity to the self. The book argues that this model of self and signification plays a central role in the formulation of Freud's psychoanalytic theory. If the self is a riddle, as many in the nineteenth century claim, Freud takes the figure seriously and interprets the mind according to all the structures and techniques of that textual genre.