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The Grimm Reader: The Classic Tales of the Brothers Grimm. Edited and translated by Maria Tatar. Introduction by A. S. Byatt. New York: W. W. Norton, 2010. xxxix + 325 pp., illustrations.
Although Maria Tatar states in her introduction that the aim of The Grimm Readeris to provide "a hotline" to the tales of the Brothers Grimm, "unencumbered by introductions and annotations [and not] cooked at the fires of the academic hearth" (xxii), this book includes not only a selection of stories from the Kinderund Hausmarchen (Children's and Household Tales) in a (new) translation by Tatar but also a wealth of peritextual material that one would normally expect in a more academic edition. This may be because this reader is a companion piece to Tatar's magnificently scholarly Annotated Brothers Grimm (2004) and follows its structure of offering two introductions, a biography of the Grimms, Wilhelm Grimm's introduction to their first edition, and a collection of quotations on "the magic of fairy tales."
In her elegantly written introduction, A. S. Byatt talks about what real fairy tales mean to her, differentiating authored stories with their psychological terror from authentic, orally derived tales, which "are older, simpler, and deeper than the individual imagination" (x). She lightly covers the different approaches to folklore study: the universal nature of fairy tale motifs; the relationship of fairy tales to myth; Freudian analysis of the psychological purpose of fairy tales and the original motivation for their collection as a gesture of German cultural identification; Lüthi's ideas on the "true"...