Grimms Fairy Tales and nineteenth century superheroes

The Brothers Grimm collected fairy stories, adding moralistic elements and removing references to sexuality. They favoured certain types of story and often rewrote them or combined several stories into one, blurring the line between recording and writing new literature.

This talk asks what we can learn from the fairy story and how it has been manipulated by different writers. Is the fairy story’s hero so different from a modern superhero? Tales can teach us lessons, subvert authority, provide hope for change, create empathy for minorities, and promote creativity, but also reinforce class structures and ridicule the weak. In this talk I will give a short tour of the history of folktale collection in Germany and what happens when scientific, literary and nationalist interests are in conflict with each other.

I will introduce older versions of well-known stories which are often more violent, bawdy and illogical than the ones we remember from childhood, and explore why this has come to be the case. I will also refer to modern adaptations of folk stories in Disney films (including Marvel), but also in literature by Angela Carter, J. R. R. Tolkien, and Charles Dickens.

Dr. Elizabeth Ramsey is a Fellow in German Literature at Corpus Christi College, Cambridge. Her research is on concepts of play, childhood and development in Modern German Literature, especially of the long nineteenth century. She has researched at the Universities of Warwick, Oxford, Chicago and the Humboldt and Free Universities of Berlin. She is currently working on a book on play in German literature.