Grimms' 'Kinder- und Hausmaerchen' in postmodern contexts

Grimms' fairy tales and postmodernism? Post-Grimm, postmodern fairy tales? What is postmodernism and how does it pertain to reworkings of fairy tales from Grimms' 19th-century fairy-tale collection, the Kinder- und Hausmarchen ? What narrative features characterize a postmodern literary and artistic response to the classical fairy-tale genre? What postmodern themes can be discerned in the dynamic and creative treatments of Grimms' tales by contemporary authors and artists? And how does the traditional fairy-tale model fare in a postmodern reformulation?; This study poses these very questions in the analysis of several contemporary adaptations of Grimms' Kinder- und Hausmarchen. As a preliminary framework, the three chapters in part one provide an introduction to Grimms' Kinder- und Hausmarchen, a brief outline of postmodernism as well as a discussion of the connection between fairy tales and postmodernism. The four chapters of part two include interpretive analyses of fairy-tale adaptations with an eye toward illustrating their postmodern narrative strategies and themes. Chapter four treats Iring Fetscher's collection of fairy-tale parodies and parodic fairy-tale interpretations Wer hat Domroschen wachgekusst? Das Marchen-Verwirrbuch (Who Woke Sleeping Beauty With a Kiss? The Fairy-Tale Book of Confusion , 1972). Chapter five investigates Gunter Grass's 700-page fairy-tale novel Der Butt (The Flounder) as an example of fairy tale as historiographic metafiction. Chapter six examines Robert Coover's Briar Rose, a hypertextual revision of the classic "Sleeping Beauty" tale, and the last chapter presents an analysis of three multimedia adaptations (web page, live multimedia video performance and DVD-Rom prototype) of Grimms' tale "The Story of the Youth Who Went Forth to Learn What Fear Was" by artist-performer M. R. Petit.; While one cannot speak of "a" postmodern fairy tale, it is apparent that postmodern authors' responses to Grimms' fairy tales are multifaceted ones. On a basic level, contrary to the Grimms' project of refining each fairy tale in search of an ideal historical core version, postmodern authors consistently work to represent and critique Grimms' fairy tales before instilling a new sense of variation, indeterminacy, dynamism and polyvalency in the fairy-tale genre through their own original and plural reworkings.