“Haywood and the Reading Public: Reclaiming Femininity and Didactic Expression from Fantomina to Besty Thoughtless” by Hanna Warsame

As “the most prolific British woman writer of the eighteenth century,” Eliza Haywood was forced to examine her authorial intent in the face of an onslaught of personal attacks by her male contemporaries (Saxton 2, 8). Alexander Pope’s The Dunciad (1728) remains the most well-known public critique of Haywood’s writing – “shameless,” “scandalous,” and “licentious” were among the politically loaded terms he used to categorize her work (Saxton 7). Scholars have noted the clash of values at the heart of this critique: Pope’s Scriblerian sympathies were in direct opposition to the “secret histories” found in women’s writing such as that of Haywood’s (Brewer 220); by extension, writing that emphasized and even praised women’s expression of sexuality, feeling, and emotions consequently lacked honour, value, and respect. Pope was not alone in his critique of the author: Henry Fielding and Richard Savage both similarly attacked her status as a woman writer (i.e., “Mrs. Novel”) as well as the “scandalous” content of her fiction (7-8).

Gender no doubt had its role to play in these critiques: eighteenth-century society already contained pre-established biases against women’s writing, associating it with “inappropriate public display, sexual transgression,” and, most strikingly, “the production of inferior texts,” (Saxton 8). As a result of Pope’s critiques, Haywood’s readership was divided into two groups: “those who admired her talent as a chronicler [of] sensations of love, and those who sided with the Scriblerians [in] seeing her as the epitome of scandal-writing,” (Brewer 223). Two questions consequently arise from these events: Firstly, how did Haywood’s relationship with the English reading public change after the 1730s, and secondly, how did the content of Haywood’s writing and creative production become transformed as a result of these critiques through the printing press?

Despite the attacks on her reputation, Haywood’s creative genius allowed her to remain true to her status as the “Great Arbitress of Passion” throughout her career (Brewer 225), with the rising number of novels and periodicals “attributed” to her name remaining a topic of debate within Haywood scholarship today (Orr 335, Brewer 218-19). I argue that the historical development (rather than the decline) of Haywood’s didacticism rests on two propositions: firstly, that traditional readings of Haywood’s narratorial shift from youthful “amatory” to mature “domestic” fiction are false; and secondly, that the political nature of Haywood’s writings increased in transparency in the years leading up to the French Revolution.

The centre of focus for my analysis of Haywood’s didacticism therefore comprises of the “socialized conditions” (McGann 120) as well as the political and economic contexts (King 26-7) in which her fiction was being published. With regards to gender norms, a comparison of Haywood’s early works, such as Fantomina (1725), with her later publications, such as The History of Miss Betsy Thoughtless (1751), demonstrate Haywood’s desire to not only claim but also reclaim femininity and personal identity through the course of her career. 

Haywood’s early novel Fantomina demonstrates values as anti-Scriblerian as it gets. As a  “masquerade novel,” the identity of Fantomina is hidden throughout multiplicities of narrative masks. I argue that Haywood does not truly discard with this masking technique in her later works, such as Betsy Thoughtless, a narrative in which young women are still forced to perform their virtue to maintain public respectability in order to “survive” within the social constraints of eighteenth-century England. This makes Haywood’s supposed shift to “domestic” fiction no less “amatory,” if indeed the “scandalous” nature of her writing remains a fundamental component of her later texts.

Haywood’s fiction is therefore necessarily a medium through which she can transparently communicate to the reading public expressions of gender, sexuality, and politics; even moreso in the latter half of her career.

 

Author Biography

Hanna Warsame is an MA student in English at the University of Ottawa. Her research focuses on Wael Hallaq’s revision of Edward Said’s Orientalism, as it applies to Romantic literature of the long eighteenth-century. She is the recipient of a SSHRC MA award for her research proposal in British Romanticism and the Ottoman Empire.

 

Works Cited

Brewer, David. “‘Haywood,’ Secret History, and the Politics of Attribution.” The Passionate Fictions of Eliza Haywood, edited by Kirsten T. Saxton and Rebecca P. Bocchicchio, University Press of Kentucky, 2000.

King, Kathryn R. A Political Biography of Eliza Haywood. Routledge, 2012.

McGann, Jerome J. The Beauty of Inflections: Literary Investigations in Historical Method and Theory. Oxford UP, 1985.

Orr, Leah. “The Basis for Attribution in the Canon of Eliza Haywood.” The Library: The Transactions of the Bibliographical Society, vol. 12, no. 4, 2011, pp. 335-375.

Powell, Manushag N. “Eliza Haywood, Periodicalist(?)” Journal for Early Modern Cultural Studies, vol. 14, no. 4, 2014, pp. 163-186.

Saxton, Kirsten T, and Rebecca P. Bocchicchio, editors. The Passionate Fictions of Eliza Haywood. University Press of Kentucky, 2000.

 

“Tribal Terminology or the Language of Liberation: Tracing Volk from Herder to Büchner” by Jeffrey Jarzomb

While not necessarily explicitly tied to Romanticism, this project deals with the use and conceptualization of the term “Volk” in selected works by several Romantic or proto-Romantic authors including Johann Gottfried von Herder, Friedrich Schiller, and Heinrich von Kleist, before moving past Romanticism to Therese Huber and Georg Büchner. Using a wide breadth of texts from these authors, this dissertation will examine the development of a discourse of “Volk” and ethnicity which reflects, in some ways, a burgeoning conception of German nationality. The prevalence of the term “Volk” can be seen in its use within every iteration of a German Constitution, starting with the recommendations of the Frankfurter Nationalversammlung in 1848, and is present in language as innocuous as folk festivals and as virulent as Nazi rhetoric. 

This research project gives particular attention to the friction between instances of aspiration and execution in unifying cultural groups within these texts, hypothesizing that the idealistic notions associated with this term gradually decline as faith in their realization dissipates. Notable works adhering to this trend include Schiller’s Wilhelm Tell, a dramatized account of the Swiss national founding myth; Kleist’s Der Prinz von Homburg, which is often read through the themes of national unification; Huber’s Klosterberuf, a narrative that explicitly questions the nature of ethnicity and its expression in the feminine; and Büchner’s Dantons Tod, a drama that sees both main characters’ rhetoric revolve around speaking for the “Volk.” Although these texts set a clear trajectory in the progression of this discourse, there are many other examples from these authors that problematize this concept. Ideally, this dissertation will resolve such contradictions in a meaningful way that also sheds light on the problematic nationalisms of our own times.

Starting with the philosophical writings of Herder, as well as some of the reference literature from the period, a distinct connection between the concepts of “Volk,” ethnicity, language, and statehood begin to emerge. Many of these texts contain conflicts between the prescriptive definitions of their terms, how they would like to see such terms viewed moving forward, and their descriptive sections, denoting their current applications. This specific tension is quite visible in Herder’s Ossian und die Lieder alter Völker, in which his hope for the fulfillment of his prescriptions is dashed by the generous—and ahistorical—editorializing of the text he analyzes. 

This project will examine the philosophical and literary disconnects between the possibilities revealed in unifying large groups under cultural and class-based conceptions and their realization. More often than not, the actualization of these concepts within the text leads to unexpected or disastrous consequences. In Michael Kohlhaas, the nobility wins and the once unified “provisorische(n) Weltregierung” has degenerated into a mob of looters. Büchner’s Dantons Tod sees both Danton and Robespierre using (and abusing) the rhetoric of “das Volk” for their own purposes, to the detriment of their revolution. Schiller’s Wilhelm Tell, however, sees the ultimate success of this language in the expulsion of foreign empire and the death of the central villain, Geßler. 

While questions around aspiration and execution will undoubtedly remain central throughout the examination of works in this project, discussions on the parameters of membership within this group will also play a central role. How does one determine who is a member of the “Volk”? To what extent does this term refer to class? How do female characters express their sense of membership, or more importantly, in which ways can they not express their membership? The intersections of identities and the dichotomies of inclusivity v. exclusivity and aspiration v. execution will be a guiding theme in the development of this dissertation.

 

Bio:

Jeffrey Jarzomb is a third year PhD student in the University of Washington’s German Studies Program. In the coming months he will take his doctoral exams and, hopefully, achieve candidate status. Jeffrey’s primary research interests are the intersections of nationalism and literature in the late 18th and early 19th centuries.

“Inner Human Being, Rehabilitation of Theological Motif in Light of the Psychology of Friedrich Schleiermacher” by Matthis Glatzel

‘Inner human being’ is one of the key concepts of Paul’s anthropology. On the hand,  Paul describes it in 2. Cor 4,16 as part of being human, which is renewed daily, and,  on the other hand, he locates it close to what he calls “law” in Rom 7,22. This motif  has its origin in Plato’s politeia and is negotiated in works from Augustine to Martin  Luther. While Plato describes it as being strongly linked to reason in opposition to  instinct, it is Augustine who identifies a deeper connection between ‘inner human  being’ and truth. Finally, Luther distinguishes between ‘inner’ and ‘outer human being’.  Not surprisingly, he understands ‘inner human being’ as being in a deep connection to  god while ‘outer human being’ is lost in sin. In summary, one can say that ‘inner human  being’ is one part of being human itself, but it is also directed toward a transcendent  sphere. 

When researching that concept in current theological encyclopedias, it is either not  mentioned at all or rejected as a Hellenistic estrangement of biblical anthropology.  Considering its great importance in Paul’s anthropology, this neglect is surprising and  likewise a symptom of anti-psychologism in philosophy and theology. This tradition  reaches back to the middle of the 19th century. At that time, psychology developed from  a philosophical into a scientific discipline. In this form, psychology has nothing to offer  for the explanation of a theological motif.  

To counter anti-psychologism in philosophy and theology, I am convinced that it is  necessary to search for concepts within romantic traditions. They are prior to  philosophical and theological anti-psychologism, emphasize inwardness, and, in the  form of the Psychologievorlesungen (Lectures on Psychology) of Friedrich  Schleiermacher, they offer a psychological concept that holds a fundamentally different  starting point than the psychology which had arisen at the end of the 19th century: the  term “living”. It derives from Friedrich Schlegel and Novalis and therefore can be  considered a motif of romantic philosophy. Moreover, it has formative power over the  psychological work of Schleiermacher. He does not strictly separate between body and  soul but sees a connection between both in the “living”. What he understands under  “living” can best be described as movement or as continuous interaction between  subject and object. As Schleiermacher’s Psychologievorlesungen are grounded in the  term “living”, he develops his concept from the “Denktätigkeiten” ( activities of  cognition) toward the feeling of the sublime and the beautiful, culminating in religious  feeling. 

In my research, I want to conceptualize ‘inner human being’ as being part of the human  conscience and explain how to understand its directedness toward a transcendent  sphere. For this, Schleiermacher’s work is very productive because he presents an  innovative conception of “inside” and “outside”. The two of them are connected in the  unity of “living”. This connection is maintained by means of every mental action  happening in both spheres, as action proceeds from “inside” to “outside” as well as in  the opposite direction. Accordingly, Schleiermacher offers an exposition of the human  inner workings, points out its context with “living”–instead of just with notional reflexion- -and presents an explanation of what can be understood as ‘inner human being’.

Author Bio:

Matthis Glatzel is a PhD student at the University of Leipzig, Germany. He studied philosophy and theology in Mainz, Frankfurt and Leipzig and is mainly interested in philosophy of religion. In his research he examines the psychology of Friedrich Schleiermacher as a philosophical psychology, which is deeply grounded in romantic thoughts and ideas.  

“Abduction and Pursuit Plots in the Romantic-era Novel” by Katherine Nolan

I am in the early stages of researching a book project tentatively titled, “Hot Pursuit: Abduction Narratives in the Romantic-era Novel.”  The Romantic-era novel is a notoriously disparate subject. Even the phrase “Romantic-era novel” suggests that scholars are hesitant to declare something definitively as a “Romantic novel.” Instead, fiction from 1776-1832 is a patchwork of genres that seems to bear the handiwork of Victor Frankenstein himself. The NOVEL special issue on the Romantic-era novel highlights the sense of the novel itself as “hijacked” by genre fiction. These genres, loosely defined, include sentimental novels, gothic novels, and historical novels. Through these genres, I detect one figure running (or being chased) through all of them: the abducted female figure. Charting a lineage from Richardson’s Clarissa, romantic-era heroines across all genres are in constant danger of abduction and entrapment. Even the gentle drama of Jane Austen’s novels flirt with an abduction plot in Emma. My book project will attempt to map how these genres relate to the narrative of abduction as a way of charting, if not ideological coherence, than at very least the ideological battle lines of the Romantic era. I am also thinking about subtle differences in these plots; for instance, the difference between pursuit and abduction. Perhaps these distinctions might offer something like the influential template Toni Bower created for the novels of 1660-1760 in Force or Fraud. I am in the early stages of researching this project. Some preliminary questions I have are: What are the salient differences between the various genres of the Romantic era as they approach abduction plots? Can these plots help scholars define some commonalities in the Romantic novel?  How do domestic plots about abduction interact with the very real abductions of African people during the romantic period? What can abduction plots tell us about the Romantic era? 

Just as an example of the kinds of moments in novels I am interested in: I have found myself thinking a lot about Ann Radcliffe’s early novel A Sicilian Romance as an exemplar of a “pursuit” plot. The heroine, Julia, has run off with her lover Hippolitus to escape the odious, older suitor chosen for her by her father (in a move reminiscent of Clarissa). Radcliffe figures Julia’s escape in relation to her confusion with another gothic heroine in pursuit. For, in the forest, there are two women with their lovers escaping from evil patriarchs. Just when we think Julia is at risk of being caught, Radcliffe swaps her with a near identical figure: 

Wretched girl! I have at least secured you!,’ said a cavalier, who now entered the room. He stopped as he perceived Julia; and turning to the men who stood without, ‘Are these,’ said he, ‘the fugitives you have taken?’… it appeared that the stranger was the Marquis Murani, the father of the fair fugitive whom the duke had before mistaken for Julia. (Radcliffe 112) 

 

Because Julia is indistinguishable from this other gothic heroine, both women are able to escape their pursuers. It allows them to enact their own desires to be with their lovers. Julia’s double also points to the generic nature of gothic novels, the rigidity of their conventions often cast by critics as a potential detractor from the seriousness and literary value of the form. However, generic convention seems to be crucial to how the novel imagines possibilities of agency within the pursuit plot. Julia is fungible with other women because their stories are the same, not because they might look the same; creating structures of mutual aid between women. 

 

Bio: Katherine Nolan earned her Ph.D. in 2020 from the University of Chicago. Her dissertation was titled, “She Objects: On the (Im)Mobility of Women in the Eighteenth Century Novel.” Katherine’s work has appeared in Philological Quarterly, The Rambling, and (forthcoming) Eighteenth-Century Fiction. She has presented at ASECS, NASSR, and the Legacies of Enlightenment Workshop. Katherine now teaches high school English at an independent school in the Seattle area. 

 

“Michael Hamburger’s Goethe:  Some Conditions of Literary Translation” by Jonny Elling (University of Bristol) 

In 1983, Michael Hamburger published Roman Elegies, a selection of Goethe poems  translated into English. It was the culmination of a lifelong engagement with this most  famous of German poets. Hamburger, an Anglo-German translator and writer, tackled his  first Goethe poem at fifteen, but he was nearly sixty when Roman Elegies appeared. The  Introduction to the expanded edition is a lesson in the forces that shapes a literary translator’s  work: biography, historical circumstance, poetic skills and principles, enthusiasm, and one’s  capacity as a critic.

Hamburger is wonderfully honest about his book’s origins. Only the 150th anniversary  of Goethe’s death could ‘prod’ him into collating decades of irregular work in a publishable volume, and the process only confirmed his perennial struggles:

If even the present gathering of all but my juvenile versions of                  poems by  Goethe remains miscellaneous in character, one                       reason is that I have neve been able to translate Goethe as                         persistently and consistently as […] his  younger contemporary               Hölderlin.[1]

That said, the limit imposed by Hamburger’s efforts has not hindered his own aesthetic  encounter with Goethe’s poetry. He has not simply translated the poems which he could in  his ‘own fashion’, but also those he was ‘moved’ to. The fashion means staying loyal to what  moved him.[2] The translations in Roman Elegies are ‘pointers’ and ‘inductions’, not ‘“English  poems in their own right”’.[3]

If the translatory technique is ‘empathetic’, this empathy is not only for Goethe  himself but for readers held off from Goethe by a language barrier. But Hamburger  anticipates their enjoyment will primarily be intellectual:

English poetry is so rich as to have little need or room for                           additions in the  guise of translations; but our awareness of                       ‘world literature’ is not rich enough  to do without a poet as                        extraordinary and as central as Goethe.[4]

If Roman Elegies ‘arouse[s] curiosity’ for Goethe, then, it ‘will have served its purpose’.[5] A  dispassionate goal, but one stemming from passion. When Hamburger evaluates Goethe, he  glows with admiration for the poet’s ‘uniqueness’ and ‘staggering diversity’.[6]But the relationship is not purely emotive. That Goethe commands German is an analytical  observation, drawn from poems ‘inextricably rooted in their linguistic humus’, and whose  author has ‘cultivated every stratum of the spoken and written language’.[7]

To justify himself, Hamburger begins a properly linguistic investigation, while  bringing this back in turn to the translation process. Römische Elegien transformed the  classical elegiac couplet by reproducing it in German. To restage this transformation,  Hamburger has settled on English hexameter, which has a similarly ‘refractory’ power.[8] Elsewhere, Hamburger found no English equivalent to Sehnsucht which would fit a particular poem’s metre. Yet in scrutinising the word, Hamburger considered not only the meaning of  Sehnsucht but also its associations. Having found such an association in ‘loss’, he saw that  the poem as a whole adequately conveyed the feeling of Sehnsucht, and ‘loss’ could stand in  for the word itself.[9]

If Hamburger can reconcile enjoyment and close reading of Goethe’s poetry, why  does he expect a more intellectual response from us? The answer goes back to his logistical  difficulties. So many poems have eluded him that all he can offer is a ‘gathering’, which gives readers ‘an intimation of Goethe’s thematic range’. A representative book would  demand ‘untranslatab[le]’ poems, ‘hundreds’ of them, and more space than publishing  allows.[10]

In Hamburger, then, spirited reading meets the printed world and the translator’s own  intellect. Whatever his sense of his own limitations, he successfully navigates the  practicalities of publication, channels his enthusiasm into analysis to find the best textual  solutions, and translates his own joyful encounter into a new language.

References

Hamburger, Michael, ‘Introduction’, in Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Roman Elegies, and  Other Poems and Epigrams, trans. by Michael Hamburger, 2nd edn (London: Anvil Press  Poetry, 1996), pp. 9–16.

Author Biography

Jonny Elling is a first-year PhD student at the University of Bristol. His collaborative project  with the British Library examines the archive of poet and translator Michael Hamburger, and is funded by the AHRC. Jonny’s thematic interests are in Romanticism, translation,  creativity, and comparative literature.

 

 

[1] Michael Hamburger, ‘Introduction’, in Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Roman Elegies, and  Other Poems and Epigrams, trans. by Michael Hamburger, 2nd edn (London: Anvil Press  Poetry, 1996), pp. 9–16 (p. 9).

[2] Ibid., p. 11.

[3] Ibid., p. 15.

[4] Ibid., pp. 15–16.

[5] Ibid., p. 16.

[6] Ibid., p. 9

[7] Ibid., pp. 9–10.

[8] Ibid., p. 15.

[9] Ibid., p. 15.

[10] Ibid., p. 13.

 

“An Introduction to Percy Shelley’s Gothic Fiction” by Molly Watson

On 8 March 1812, nineteen-year-old Percy Shelley wrote the following letter to William Godwin:

[…] [T]o you, I owe the inestimable boon of granted power, of arising from the state of intellectual sickliness and lethargy which I was plunged two years ago, and of which ‘St. Irvyne’ and ‘Zastrozzi’ were the distempered altho unoriginal visions. 

(LPBS I, 226)

Shelley claims that only by reading Godwin’s Political Justice (1793) was he “no longer the votary of Romance” (228). Shelley’s romances, written and published the previous year are typical Gothic novels. Zastrozzi (1810) is a revenge tale in which the eponymous character seeks to destroy the son of the man who had sexually dishonoured Zastrozzi’s mother. St. Irvyne (1811) is a more complex work. Readers are first introduced to a Gothic narrative in which the bandit Wolfstein is haunted by the spirit-human Ginotti, who seeks to obtain the elixir vitae. Running parallel to this is a sentimental plot following the plight of Eloise De St. Irvyne, who is impregnated by the libertine Nempere and subsequently marries the Irish nobleman Fitzeustace. St. Irvyne ends with the somewhat puzzling declaration that “Ginotti is Nempere. Eloise is the sister of Wolfstein” (252). Between 1809-12 Shelley produced an immense amount of literature, ranging from Gothic poetry to Godwinian novels contemplating the failure of the French revolution. It was a period of rapid development for Shelley, both politically and personally.

Unsurprisingly, contemporary reviewers did not warm to Shelley’s novels. Proclaiming themselves as guardians of public decency, The Critical Review attacked Zastrozzi as “one of the most savage and improbable demons that ever issued from a diseased brain” (329). Similarly, St. Irvyne was regarded by The Anti-Jacobin as a novel only fit for prostitutes (Barcus, 53). Subsequent scholarship has not been much kinder. Biographer Jean Overton Fuller dubiously suggests that Shelley wrote his Gothic fiction in a state of somnambulism, and therefore did not fully comprehend what he had written (31). For Angela Wright and Dale Townshend, Shelley “dabbled” in the Gothic before moving on to bigger and better things, as it were (14). Such scholarly dismissal demonstrates the sheer desperation to cling onto Shelley’s literary wholeness. Yet, this was formed in part by Shelley himself, who would always feel embarrassed that he succumbed to “intellectual sickliness and lethargy” (226). 

But to cling onto Shelley’s literary wholeness is to dismiss the many nuances and complexities within his Gothic fiction. If it has been established that the Gothic and British Romanticism are ambiguous and fluid, there has been little incentive to approach Shelley’s novels in the same way. Indeed, Zastrozzi and St. Irvyne demonstrate Shelley’s experimentation with literary narrativization and genre, as well as showcasing his conflicting ideological voice. Shelley sympathises with Zastrozzi’s atheistic dismissal of “vulgar prejudices” (103) while celebrating divine retribution, which seems odd given that Shelley was a self-proclaimed atheist at the time. Likewise, in St. Irvyne, Shelley honours free love while simultaneously warning Nempere that “the God whom thou hast insulted has marked thee!” (232). The novels, then, are far more intricate than previously acknowledged. 

Indeed, trying to pin Shelley down as an arrogant young man who “tired” of the Gothic in favour of intellectualism is problematic. Attempting to fill in the gaps of Shelley’s juvenilia ignores the fact that Shelley as a man and as a writer is an aporia, a found manuscript that is, essentially, incomplete. Zastrozzi and St. Irvyne are not simply antecedents to his major poetry, and to read them solely in relation to his “masterpieces” dismisses the novels’ own autonomy. Paradoxically, Shelley is at his most Romantic when Gothic. 

Author biography

Molly graduated with a first-class BA in English Literature at Huddersfield in 2020 and is currently conducting an MRes on Percy Shelley’s Gothic fiction. She has submitted a PhD proposal on motherhood and loss in the children’s literature of Sara Coleridge and Mary Shelley. 

Works Cited

“ART. 19.-Zastrozzi; a Romance, 1 Vol.” The Critical Review, Or, Annals of Literature, vol. 21, no. 3, 1810, pp. 329-331. ProQuest, https://search-proquest-com.libaccess.hud.ac.uk/historical-periodicals/art-19-zastrozzi-romance-1-vol/docview/4380540/se-2?accountid=11526. Accessed 3 Feb 2021.

Barcus, James. Shelley: The Critical Heritage. Routledge & K. Paul, 1975, 53. 

Fuller, Jean Overton. Shelley. Jonathan Cape, 1968, 31. 

Shelley, Percy Bysshe. The Letters of Percy Bysshe Shelley, Vol I: Shelley in England. Edited by Frederick Jones, Clarendon Press, 1964, 226-228.

Shelley, Percy Bysshe. Zastrozzi & St. Irvyne. Edited by Stephen Behrendt, Broadview Press, 2002, 59-252.

Wright, Angela, and Townshend, Dale, editors. Romantic Gothic: An Edinburgh Companion. Edinburgh University Press, 2016, 14.

New Approaches Blog: “Emotion, Deixis, and Wordsworth” by Madeleine Roepe

One of the first things we learn to do is to reach, or point, to things and people which become important to us. Our need for pointing in order to be understood manifests itself in language, and this essential cognitive tool has a name: deixis.

 

Pronouns are common deictic devices used to indicate boundaries of “I,” “you,” and “we.” The pronoun “she” for example semantically indicates a female-presenting person, but once placed into conversation comes to mean (or becomes synonymous with) one particular person with which the ‘pointer’ establishes a relationship. Space is also defined via deictic terms to clarify particular location: “here,” “there,” “near,” “far,” etc. We’re used to seeing this kind of thing with the Romantics: broadly speaking, the experiential nature of poetry by Coleridge, Wordsworth, and others is often rooted in this sense of particularity.

 

Take Coleridge’s “This Lime-tree Bower my Prison” – the very first word is deictic. The imagined conversation within Wordsworth’s “We Are Seven” endlessly concerns itself with relations built through deixis, a miscommunication between “we”s, “you”s, and “in”s. 

 

In the past, linguistic understandings of deixis haven’t been explicitly connected to cognitive theories of emotion. However, in observing the ways in which Romantic poets (particularly Wordsworth) rely on deictic terms to communicate meaning in personal experience, I’ve come to suspect that there is a link between the two.

 

Poems like “This Lime-tree Bower” and “We Are Seven” prescribe certain value judgments to a reader by virtue of deictic phrases: “this” is marked as significant, “we” in a family includes a count of the dead and not just the living. It is this inherent system of value encoded within poetic language and the cognitive process of building value that interests me as a scholar. I thus aim to close read Romantic poetry through a new lens: a reimagining of emotion as fundamentally evaluative and the basis of everyday decision-making, rooted in neuroscientific research dating back to the mid-1990s.

 

Cognitive approaches to Romantic texts have been undertaken before by scholars like Richardson, Bruhn, Spolsky, Zunshine, and more – my own methods arise directly from this precedent. But even within these innovative projects in ‘cognitive Romanticism,’ figurative language reigns supreme as more explicitly ‘emotional.’ (Many lab studies conducted on neurological effects of language have also historically focused on metaphor.) These analyses are rarely connected to the essential non-cognitive appraisals that scholars now cite as origin points for emotions themselves, and where I hope to intervene in this growing subfield is with my unique emphasis on the importance of background textual elements such as pronouns, prepositions, and other articles of speech typically overlooked as empty of emotional content. 

 

Through analyses of poems like “Tintern Abbey,” it is my proposal that deixis concretizes a reader’s spatial orientation within a poem to the effect of building a system of value within that poem. This system affects a reader’s final judgment of the poem’s content, like the presence or implied presence of other bodies. These close readings can also be supported by several recent studies detailing the importance of background text in comprehension.

 

Including deixis and other traditionally “non-emotional” content in analyses of emotion constructed through text transforms not only the ways we read canonical Romantic poetry, but also how we understand reading more generally. Literature in every form calls upon us to make value judgments as we engage with it in order for it to have any meaning; how exactly these judgments are built into poetic structure is a pressing issue for many scholars, and it is my hope that this continued research may reach across discipline lines to begin that conversation.

 

Short author biography:

Maddie Roepe is a fourth-year PhD candidate at the University of California, Santa Barbara specializing in Romanticism and neurological theories of emotion. Beginning with her undergraduate education at Boston University’s Kilachand Honors College and in her current role as the UCSB Literature and the Mind RA, her passion in academics lies in encouraging interdisciplinary conversations about meaning and the human condition. Her dissertation is entitled The Hidden Language of Emotion: Cognitive Romanticism in Wordsworth and Shelley.

New Approaches to Romanticism Blog: “Coleridge and the Supernatural” by Elizabeth Laughlin

Samuel Taylor Coleridge, in his “The Rime of the Ancient Marinere,” (1798) delights in the supernatural, particularly in the realm of spirits. Unlike Wordsworth, his counterpart in Lyrical Ballads and good friend, Coleridge views nature as separate from himself, and in that regard, Friedrich Schiller would have considered Coleridge to be a sentimental poet. Nevertheless, when involving the supernatural, Coleridge depends upon his idea of the “suspension of disbelief”—or “the means by which the reader might accept unreal elements of verse to illuminate senses strictly afforded within the real” (McMorrough 229). It is through this process that Coleridge’s work transcends space and time, and lost in Coleridge’s world, the reader questions his own reality.

In the introduction of Lyrical Ballads, Fiona Stafford of the Oxford University Press discusses the writing abilities and partnership of Wordsworth and Coleridge. She states, “To make the supernatural entirely believable, or to transform the ordinary into something equally compelling, required extraordinary imaginative and technical powers” (xxix). Both Wordsworth and Coleridge viewed the imagination as an almost supernatural feature, although Coleridge dives into the metaphysical much more. Stafford also writes that “although the supernatural are most obvious in ‘The Ancient Marinere,’ the poem can be—and often has been—read psychologically or symbolically” (xxix). Stafford’s point is an excellent segue to discuss what the supernatural symbolically represents in Romantic writing.

The first poem of the 1798 and 1802 edition of Lyrical Ballads is “The Rime of the Ancient Marinere,” which features a mariner who has been cursed. Coleridge’s poems “Kubla Khan” and “Christabel” also feature the supernatural, but it is important to note that he did not include them in Lyrical Ballads. However, all three of these pieces feature dreams, as expressed in Jennifer Ford’s essay. She writes, citing essayist Thomas DeQuincey, “DeQuincey described [Coleridge] as a poet…a prolific dreamer: a man whose poetry was shrouded in mystery—supernatural like the ‘ancient marin

ere’—awfully sublime” (Ford 171). 

“The Rime of the Ancient Marinere” features its own spirits, although they look different from traditional ghosts. In fact, Coleridge’s spirits are sublime entities—things not to be understood by the human brain. The following section is an excerpt describing Coleridge’s spirits:

“I saw something in the Sky

No bigger than my fist

At first it seem’d a little speck

And then it seem’d a mist” (lines 139-142). 

This “mist” that Coleridge describes also represents the sublime, often symbolized by a mist or a fog. This entity soon curses the entire ship, leaving all the people on board dead except the mariner, who must live with the curse. Here is an excerpt about the curse that plagues the mariner:

“An orphan’s curse would drag to Hell

A spirit from on high

But O! More horrible than that 

Is the curse in a dead man’s eye!

Seven days, seven nights I saw that curse

And yet I could not die” (lines 249-254)

By repeating the word “seven,” Coleridge makes these lines sound like a chant, going along with the ballad structure. Because he does not die, the mariner is cursed and must repeat the story in order to find any peace.  This is an embodiment of storytelling and the role writers and storytellers play. After hearing the mariner’s story, the wedding guest turns into “[a] sadder and wiser man” (line 624). It is through this repetition, this retelling of stories, that represents the oral tradition of stories, including ghost stories.

 

Biographical Statement: Elizabeth Laughlin is a graduate student at Indiana University of Pennsylvania, where she is a part of the English Literature and Composition master’s program. She also writes for the school’s Marketing and Communications Department. Above all, she is interested in Gothicism, Romanticism, and Modernism. In her spare time, she enjoys meditating, writing books, and watching football.

 

Works Cited

 

Coleridge, Samuel Taylor. “The Rime of the Ancient Marinere.” Lyrical Ballads. Edited by Fiona Stafford, Oxford University Press, 2013, pp.5-24.

Ford, Jennifer. “Samuel Taylor Coleridge and the Pains of Sleep.” History Workshop Journal, no. 48, 1999, pp. 169–186. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/4289640. Accessed 20 Jan. 2021.

McMorrough, John. “Funny, Crazy, Silly: Lyrics for The Suspension of Architectural Disbelief.” Log, no. 37, 2016, pp. 228–233. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/26324736. Accessed 20 Jan. 2021.

Stafford, Fiona. “Introduction.” Lyrical Ballads. Edited by Fiona Stafford, Oxford University Press, 2013, pp. xii-xlv.

 

Call for Papers: New Approaches to Romanticism

Call for Submissions to NASSR Graduate Blog and Joining a Discussion Group

Applications will be accepted on a rolling basis, beginning on 1 February, 2021 

Contact email: nassrgradstudentcaucus@gmail.com

 

The NASSR Graduates Students Caucus offers graduate students and all other early-career scholars researching Romanticism the possibility to present and discuss their research projects and ideas on our blog. Considering the academic job market crisis and the decision of PhD programs not to admit new students, we especially find it urgent to create a hospitable environment allowing early career scholars to continue to share their research and thoughts, being inside or outside of University.

We welcome blog posts (400-600 words) pertaining to any stage of research. Submissions can include more polished work such as research proposals and abstracts, short essays, but we are also looking for early pieces of writing reflecting the beginning of a research, e.g. a catalogue of questions, first observations and intuitions. You can submit anything connected to your research as long as it can take the form of a thought-provoking and well-drafted blog entry. By inviting each other to look at our “laboratory” of ideas, we want to initiate discussion and reflections about how to approach Romanticism on an intellectual and personal level. To encourage cross-fertilizing conversations among our blog contributors, we are open to submissions from all disciplines (e.g. post-colonial studies, digital humanities, gender and queer studies, eco-criticism). Therefore, authors should bear in mind that their audience might only have a rough idea about their field.  

After receiving a sufficient amount of applications, we will start to form a discussion group consisting of our blog contributors to provide detailed and elaborate feedback for each research project in a supportive and constructive environment. We will collaborate with the contributors to decide what this group will look like in concrete when the time comes.

 

Please, do not hesitate to reach out to us if you have any questions. We are looking forward to your submissions!

 

Submission Guidelines

We are asking those interested to submit a blog post of no more than 600 words and an accompanying short author biography of approximately 50 words. All submissions should use Times New Roman, 12-point font, double-spacing, and be combined into a single file submission. Blog entries are expected to adhere to MLA 8th Edition formatting and citation style. Please submit your application by email at nassrgradstudentcaucus@gmail.com

 

About the NASSR Graduate Student Caucus

The NASSR Graduate Student Caucus (NGSC) is intended as a venue, under the aegis of NASSR (North American Society for the Study of Romanticism; www.nassr.ca/), for graduate students interested in the study of Romanticism to make contact with one another and to share intellectual and professional resources.

We are committed to working together to further the interests, not only of the graduate student community in Romantic studies, but also of the broader profession, by helping to train active and engaged scholars who will continue to strengthen and advance themselves and the discipline. All graduate student members of NASSR are invited to attend caucus meetings and to participate in elections and panels.

For any queries, please feel free to email the organization committee at nassrgradstudentcaucus@gmail.com, or visit our website at http://nassrgrads.hcommons.org/ for more information.

Call for Papers: Fall Blog Series hosted by NGSC

Fall Blog Series hosted by NGSC

Deadline for Abstract and Author Bio Submissions: August 31, 2020

Contact email: nassrgradstudentcaucus@gmail.com

The NASSR Graduate Student Caucus welcomes abstracts by fellow graduate students related to the gothic, sublime/uncanny, and supernatural themes associated with the Romantic Period. This online blog series is intended to reimagine how graduate students can discuss and share their scholarship in a productive and meaningful digital setting beyond the confines of traditional face-to-face conferences. All accepted applicants will have their final essays published in the fall issue for the NGSC quarterly blog series on the Humanities Commons throughout October 2020. 

Although all proposals will be considered, we are most interested in essays about Romantic-era works relating to the gothic, supernatural, and macabre for this fall issue, with special emphasis pertaining to:

  • The sublime/uncanny
  • Gothic monsters 
  • Romantic works by women and persons of color
  • Personal, social, and political anxieties/ fears

Submission Guidelines

We are asking those interested to submit 300 to 500 words abstracts and 200 words author biographies by August 31, 2020. Abstracts and author biographies should use Times New Roman, 12-point font, double-spacing, and be combined into a single file submission. Please submit your application by email at nassrgradstudentcaucus@gmail.com, with your last name and the word FallblogseriesSubmission” as the file name. 

About the NASSR Graduate Student Caucus

The NASSR Graduate Student Caucus (NGSC) is intended as a venue, under the aegis of NASSR (North American Society for the Study of Romanticism; www.nassr.ca/), for graduate students interested in the study of Romanticism to make contact with one another and to share intellectual and professional resources.

We are committed to working together to further the interests, not only of the graduate student community in Romantic studies, but also of the broader profession, by helping to train active and engaged scholars who will continue to strengthen and advance themselves and the discipline. Moreover, the NASSR Graduate Student Caucus is fully committed to helping young scholars engage in antiracist conversations surrounding Romantic-era literature. All graduate student members of NASSR are invited to attend caucus meetings and to participate in elections and panels.

For any queries, please feel free to email the organization committee at nassrgradstudentcaucus@gmail.com, or visit our website at http://nassrgrads.hcommons.org/ for more information.

Introduction to “Disastrous Summers”

By Holly Horner, edited by Jordan Green and Sigmund Jakob Michael Stephan

“Disastrous Summers,” the first installment of the NGSC’s quarterly blog series, collects a set of essays by graduate students related to social, personal, environmental, and political disasters associated with the Romantic Period. As part of this ongoing blog series, we interrogated how the conversations surrounding the current COVID-19 pandemic and the  #BlackLivesMatter protests are exacerbated by events and texts from the Romantic Period. Our first upcoming submissions consider how Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein is an allegory for COVID-19 and social distancing in 2020; and how Shelley’s Last Man explores the ways in which modernity fuels pandemic disease. Alongside our initial eco-centric inquiry, “Disastrous Summers” also invited writers to engage in a more urgent consideration: how graduate students must be critical of the Romantic period’s participation in imperialistic practices by adopting the #Bigger6 philosophy of performing antiracist and anticolonial work in the study of Romanticism by moving our critical focus beyond the initial “Big Six” of Romanticism and recouping historically marginalized voices. Many thanks to those who answered our CFP.

 

The Dark Side of Romantic Fairytales – Abuse in Grimm’s Narratives by Anna Rohmann

The Dark Side of Romantic Fairytales – Abuse in Grimm’s Narratives

Some of the most popular fairytales to this day were written down in Germany during the Romantic era by the brothers Jakob and Wilhelm Grimm, who published their first edited collection in 1812. Traditional approaches to fairytale studies neglect the suffering and unequal distribution of power which extends beyond gender and class into an imbalance between children and adults. Overlooking these “generational conflicts” (Tatar, Off with their Heads xxiv) means overlooking the macabre and violent aspects of fairytale narratives. I investigate abuse in fairytales, specifically those surrounding generational conflicts. My definition of abuse includes emotional and physical patterns and aligns with criteria set out by from the independent agency for sexual abuse (Unabhängiger Beauftragter für Fragen des sexuellen Missbrauchs). For this I propose a different reading of the tales, as I illustrate on König Drosselbart (King Thrushbeard, KHM 52)[1].

  1. Child abuse in King Thrushbeard

In KD the protagonist is abused by her father as well as her husband. While the former forces his daughter into a marriage with a beggar as a questionable parenting technique during the first third of the tale, the latter establishes a manipulative relationship in his efforts to re-educate his wife.

Suprisingly, the fairytale offers justifications for the males’ abusive behavior, blaming the female adolescent. Her disobedience when she is presented to her suitors is marked by direct speech, which contrasts to the description of King Thrushbeard as a good man and of a socially respectable status (KD par. 1). She proceeds to mock him because of his appearance, further violating rules of politeness. This suggests that the father’s enraged reaction promising his daughter to a beggar and going through with it, is not only reasonable, but also speaks to his noble character as a man who keeps his word. In the same vein, King Thrushbeard states that he treated his wife badly out of love for her, portraying the abuse as a necessary educational measure, which is ultimately in favor of the protagonist (KD par. 8). These justifications are not convincing when looking at the evidence for abuse.

The text signals that the heroine is not married voluntarily through passive, impersonal formulations, such as being lead through the rows of suitors or a priest being fetched (KD par. 1-2). Not only is forced marriage a crime, but it also has devastating psychological consequences. The protagonist is understandably shocked by being married off. Her state of shock becomes visible in her difficulty processing the situation – she still describes herself as a fair maiden despite being married (KD par. 3-5) and simultaneously describes her new home in poverty with pejorative adjectives and diminutives but expects her husbands estate to include servants (KD par. 6-7). The onomatopoetic interjection (KD par. 3-7), which is reminiscent of sighs, occurs seven times in direct speech and supports the expression of her agony. Furthermore, her suffering is expressed through her work resulting in bodily harm. Her delicate hands and fingers are destroyed and bloody from the use of hard branches and thread (KD par. 7). At the court she must do the hardest work (KD par. 8), the superlative and use of modal verbs already indicate that she is forced to perform the worst tasks.

Given that the beggar is in fact King Thrushbeard, he purposefully starves his wife and keeps her in a state of existential threat (KD par. 7). He demonstrates his power three times (as it is typical for fairytales) in direct speech when going on about how vast and beautiful King Thrushbeard’s forest, pastures and cities are (KD par. 3-5). This illustrates his narcissistic tendencies. He also tortures the protagonist unnecessarily after she shows remorse for how she treated her suitor the first time they talk about it. Paradoxically, when she acknowledges that King Thrushbeard would have been a better choice for a husband, he emotionally manipulates her by asking her if he is not good enough and says he does not like his wife thinking about other men (KD par. 6). In addition, he systematically belittles her by attributing her failures at earning her living to personal inability instead of lack of experience. King Thrushbeard purposefully destroys the work she did well (KD par. 7-8) and continuously blames her, cumulating in his realization that he is the aggrieved party in their marriage.

The destruction of the protagonists self-esteem and her suffering through humiliation at the hands of her husband are illustrated by the hyperbolic description of a pot shattered into thousand pieces and her wish to be thousand feet below the earth to escape the public mockery (KD par. 7-8). When she is finally allowed to return to the court and the King reveals himself as her husband, she shows intense feelings of guilt, and shame and tries to flee when her husband touches her (KD par. 8). She even goes as far as saying she is not worthy enough to be his wife, thereby negating her self-worth (KD par. 8), showing typical symptoms for a victim of abuse. In this light, the renewed marriage is not at all a happy ending, but a depiction of a heroine trapped in a repetitive pattern of abuse. The lack of direct speech or reaction from the protagonist to the marriage confirms my interpretation. She was portrayed as outspoken and confident before her wedding; her actions are now again described in passive voice (KD par. 8).

To sum it up, KD can be read as an example of verbal abuse,[2] whose main conflict lies not in the rebelliousness of the princess, but is rather rooted in the abuse of the adolescent princess by her male, adult caregivers. Some interpretations might highlight the importance of hard labor, of forced marriage as a question of gender in patriarchic societies, or the significance of social mobility, but the unequal distribution of power can and should be transferred to the one between adolescents and adult caregivers. In fact, this is not the only fairytale in which similar patterns can be observed as the majority of Grimm’s tales showcases some kind of child abuse as an aspect that remains “remarkably stable” (Tatar, “Tests, Tasks, and Trials” 46). A forced marriage disguised through a father’s promise can be found in The Frog King. Latent incest (All-Kinds-of-Fur, The Girl without Hands) and child labor (Cinderella, Snow-White, Rumpelstiltskin, etc.), often paired with physical and verbal abuse, are not isolated incidents in the fairytale world. Boys (The brother and sister, Hansel and Gretel) or royal children fall subject to abusive patterns just as girls and children from poor families, which proves that gender and social status can be influential factors but that the biological defenselessness of children is far more important.

  1. Why is child abuse prevalent in fairytales?
  • Pedagogical reasoning

Of course, what is perceived as abuse today, had been conceived as normality in the pre-romantic era because of the Napoleonic wars, famines, and the plague (Tatar, Off with their Heads 46). Fairytales are derived from orally circulating folk tales of premodern times and their imagination of childhood (Zipes, Breaking the magic spell xi). Until the late 18th century children were treated roughly the same as adults, so the concept of childhood differed significantly from our contemporary one. The conception of childhood changed in the Romantic period due to the upcoming capitalism, which transformed the family structures of the feudal system into the bourgeois nuclear family. This shift influenced the socio-cultural reality of children immensely as they did not participate in out-of-house work anymore (Baader 417). For the first time the concept of childhood was assigned a different value “[s]eparate from the adult world and from its own adult self” (Plotz 3). Romanticist developed a discourse surrounding childhood that sees children as independent, innocent entities (Baader 417). They broke with the doctrine of original sin and developed the genius tradition, so childhood became a place of longing (Baader 419). This mythical elevation of childhood lead to the image of the natural child – “the identification of childhood with Nature […] and the attribution to children of an autonomous, unitary consciousness” (Plotz 5; Tatar “From Rags to Riches” 32; The Hard Facts 77). As a result, pedagogy of the Romantic era focused on providing a safe space for children (Baader 419). Considering this, child abuse in fairytales seems to have little in common with the Romantic concept of childhood. The emerging bourgeoise could even consider some of the rebellious morals in fairytales dangerous and condemned them for their perceived lack of virtues (Zipes, Breaking the magic spell 12,25).

Nevertheless, new social fears about education and the transition of child- into adulthood arose from the Romantic image of childhood. As caregivers had to prepare children for their future role in the economy, they discovered innovative practices of socialization – amongst them narratives targeted to educate the children. Consequently, the violent folk tales had to be edited to suit the need of the new market for educational children’s literature. It has been proven that the Grimm brothers reworked their fairytales, e.g. by excluding pregnancies or incest (Tatar, The Hard Facts 8-10, 30), while explicitly referencing the civilizing, didactic qualities of the violence left in the tales (Tatar, The Hard Facts 17). The protagonists become figures of identification for children that often see themselves as being inferior to the caregivers that distribute resources, have knowledge, and are physically superior (Tatar, The Hard Facts 21), thereby reinforcing didactic effects.

One of the prime educational goals of Grimm’s fairytales, which becomes visible in KD, is obedience. Obedience is especially important in a capitalist society in which hard work, humility, modesty and politeness were deemed to be essential “for the many girls whose household apprenticeships formed the basis for their livelihoods” (Tatar, Off with their Heads 56). Pride, vanity, stubbornness or being self-determined could contradict a marriage or the employment in another household and thus had to be eradicated. KD is a good example for this as the protagonist is described as very beautiful (KD, par. 1), but lacking in the “bourgeoise” virtues mentioned above. Her diminished sense of self but clear obedience can be seen as a successful re-education process.

  • Narrative reasoning

Moreover, child abuse is not just a didactic variable, it is crucial for the narrative itself. The abusive incident often triggers the events in fairytales. Unbearable traumatic events, in many cases abuse, are what inspire or unwillingly take heroes on their journeys, as described in the narrative patterns of fairytales in “Tests, Tasks, and Trials” by Tatar. The adults are the ones that trigger transformation processes, which are typical for fairytale narratives. The experience of abuse justifies that the children leave the safety and stability of the nuclear family behind. Tatar sums this up as follows: “The child-hero is always a victim: he has been neglected, punished, or abandoned by his parents. Escape from home becomes his sole source of consolation” (“From Rags to Riches” 31). In KD, it becomes evident that without leaving her home the protagonist might never have her journey so that she could develop the qualities desired by parents in the Romantic era. Abuse is essential to the plot as the element that propels the action forward, so this aspect of fairytales can never fully be removed from fairytales, even in our times in which making children obedient is not the primary goal of education anymore.

  1. Conclusion

Does this mean that we should accept the violence in fairytales? In my opinion the answer to this is yes. By embracing the macabre aspects of fairytales, how they are presented to us, and investigating them, we can learn about the realities of children then and even today. The victim-blaming and legitimization of questionable parenting, gaslighting and trivialization of abuse and its consequences in fairytales is a mirror image of how society treats abuse. It is telling that the most recipients of Disney adaptations of fairytales do not even recognize the violence involved in them. Looking at these macabre circumstances in the fictional tales can also help to deal with experiences of abuse – Röhr, for example, uses fairytales in his work as a psychotherapist and elaborates on the benefits of this practice in his book “Ich traue meiner Wahrnehmung”. I propose that readings centered around forms of abuse offers valuable insights into how our society views childhood and generational conflicts.

 

 

References

Baader, Meike Sophia. “Der romantische Kindheitsmythos und seine Kontinuitäten in der Pädagogik und in der Kindheitsforschung.” Zeitschrift für Erziehungswissenschaft vol.7, nr.3, 2004, pp.416-430, https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s11618-004-0042-9 . Accessed 18 October 2019.

Grimm, Jacob und Wilhelm Grimm. König Drosselbart. Otto Hendel Verlag, 1812. eBook Edition (Projekt Gutenberg). https://gutenberg.spiegel.de/buch/kinder-und-hausmarchen-7018/55.

Plotz, Judith Ann. Romanticism and the vocation of childhood. New York, Palgrave, 2001.

Röhr, Heinz-Peter. Ich traue meiner Wahrnehmung. Sexueller und emotionaler Missbrauch. 5th ed., München, Deutscher Taschenbuch Verlag, 2011.

Tatar, Maria. “From Rags to Riches: Fairy Tales and the Family Romance.” Children’s Literature Association Quaterly vol.7, nr.2, 1982, pp. 31-34, https://doi.org/10.1353/chq.0.0644. Accessed 18 October 2019.

—. Off with their heads! Fairy tales and the culture of childhood. Princeton, N.J, Princeton University Press, 1992.

—. “Tests, Tasks, and Trials in the Grimms’ Fairy Tales.” Children’s Literature vol.13, 1985, pp.31-48, https://doi.org/10.1353/chl.0.0658. Accessed 18 October 2019.

—. The hard facts of the Grimm’s fairy tales. 2nd ed., Princeton, N.J, Princeton University Press, 2003.

Unabhängiger Beauftragter für Fragen des sexuellen Missbrauchs. Geschäftsstelle des Unabhängigen Beauftragten für Fragen des sexuellen Kindesmissbrauchs, 2019, https://beauftragter-missbrauch.de/. Accessed 03 December 2019.

Zipes, Jack. Breaking the magic spell: radical theories of folk and fairy tales. 2nd ed., Lexington, KY, University Press of Kentucky, 2002.

[1] It is abbreviated with KD in the following.

[2] Signs of physical abuse can be found but elaborating on them exceeds the scope of this work.