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The Hard Facts of the Grimms' Fairy Tales. By Maria Tatar. Expanded second edition. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2003. xxxvi + 325 pp.
The fairy-tale scholarship that emerged in the 1970s and 1980s is remarkable in both its quantity and quality. Most of this work occurred in the wake of the Grimm bicentennial celebrations in 1985-86, which occasioned a fundamental reassessment of the brothers' tales and generated enormous interest-both scholarly and popular-in the fairy tale. Among the influential works of scholarship that were published during those two decades, I think in particular of the several editions of Grimms' tales edited by Heinz Rölleke; Ruth B. Bottigheimer's Grimms' Bad Girls and Bold Boys (1987); James M. McGlathery's The Brothers Grimm and Folktale (1988); and the many books authored, edited, or translated by Jack Zipes, from Breaking the Magic Spell (1979) and The Trials and Tribulations of Little Red Riding Hood (1983), to The Complete Tales of the Brothers Grimm (1987) and The Brothers Grimm (1988). I also think of Maria Tatar's elegant study of the fairy tale's "hard core," The Hard Facts of the Grimms' Fairy Tales. Published in 1987, The Hard Facts is not only one of the most important...