Framing the Brothers Grimm: Paratexts and Intercultural Transmission in Postwar English- Language Editions of the Kinder-und Hausmärchen.

Humans love not only to tell stories, but to tell stories about stories. The stories that we tell each other about Brothers Grimms' fairy tales account for much of the writing that goes on in Grimms scholarship. The conventional narrative that has been constructed to explain the world-wide reception of Grimms' "Kinderund Hausmärchen" involves a series of transformations and paradoxes that raise interesting questions. It begins with Grimms' own alleged transformation of the oral tradition into published text, a metamorphosis that ostensibly renders the audible legible between the covers of a book. When this already transformed German original is then transmitted across cultures to Anglo-American readers, for example, that printed text undergoes another linguistic-cultural transformation, a metamorphosis that renders into English what was uniquely and historically German.