Verhinderte Traditionen: Maerchen deutscher Autorinnen vor den Bruedern Grimm (Wilhelm Carl Grimm, Jacob Ludwig Carl Grimm, German text)

In German literary history, fairy tales by women writers are an (almost) unknown phenomenon. Fairy tale scholarship has mainly concentrated on men's works, first and foremost on those by the Brothers Grimm. Their Nursery and Household Tales became the representative model of “the” German fairy tale and with them the notion that women were narrators of fairy tales while only men were compilers and editors. Replicating this notion, the literary canon and fairy tale criticism rarely mention the fairy tales written and published by more than 400 women writers in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. The fact that these works have since been disregarded while men's writings have survived suggests that the exclusion of women's tales from the canon was a gender-specific phenomenon.; I argue that this exclusion has its roots in aesthetic concepts dominating the production of women's fairy tales. This dissertation, therefore, presents four case studies of fairy tales by women writers that were written and published around 1800 when the fairy tale established itself as a literary genre. With these texts, their authors participated in various subforms of the genre circulating in Germany at that time. Each chapter first determines the fairy tale tradition within which a text has to be examined. Subsequently, it outlines the gender ideology of this particular genre and then analyzes how the text reacts to it.; My study demonstrates that these fairy tales by women writers are self-reflexive literary works that critically discuss the aesthetic principles of the various fairy tale subgenres, using narrative techniques as a main vehicle to achieve this effect. These texts also constituted a forum through which their authors commented on literary, pedagogical and philosophical concepts that were not necessarily a part of the fairy tale genre in question but nevertheless indirectly linked to it.; Thus, this study reveals the poetological, aesthetic, and narrative possibilities inherent in women's fairy tales that were eradicated with the publication of the Grimms' fairy tales. Furthermore, it challenges literary criticism that unquestioningly accepts aesthetic concepts put forth by the dominant group of male writers and aesthetic theoretists more than 200 years ago.