Title: Aspects of Gender in Translations of ‘Sleeping Beauty’
Abstract: Inspired by the Romantic interest in folk songs and stories, Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm started collecting traditional tales from written and oral sources in the first decade of the nineteenth century. They saw these tales as evidence of an ancient German literature in danger of extinction and initially conceived their Kinder- und Hausmdrchen (a literal translation could be Tales for Children and the Home) as a scholarly resource, which would record the material in unedited form and include an apparatus giving information on sources, variants and contaminations. Between 1812 and 1857, they continued revising the corpus of tales, adding, removing and merging stories; by the final edition of 1857 the Kinder- und Hausmdrchen (hereafter KHM) contained 200 tales and io legends. In the course of German reception, the collection increasingly moved away from its original scholarly orientation and became more and more a children's book. Deviating from the brothers' original intention, Wilhelm substantially edited the stories in content and form throughout the seventeen editions of the KHM. In the process, he created not only a unique voice but also a distinct genre, which was taken for many years as the prototypical model of the German fairy tale; it made the KHM a classic of German children's reading matter and one of the most translated works of German literature.' Edgar Taylor's 1823 rendering German Popular Stories was one of the earliest translations of the KHM and the first translation into English. It was a highly infiuential text, which was reissued throughout the century and is still popular today.^ Nevertheless, in every single decade of the nineteenth century there were new English translations of the KHM.^ All of them were selections from the 210 stories in the KHM, ranging from a handful of tales to 190 stories, until Margaret Hunt's scholarly translation in 1882, which for the first time translated