Fairy Tales

Since we’re getting close to the deadline, how are everyone else’s essays going at this point? I’m having some trouble getting my thesis in order and connecting all the points in my essay, and it’s also not long enough yet. Has everyone else been using a lot of sources? For some reason I’ve been using [...]

As I get ready to divide you all into writing groups for this essay, do you want to weigh in on whether it would be more helpful or more counter-productive to work with people writing on the same tale? There are advantages and disadvantages to both approaches, of course.
Let me know your druthers in [...]

Howdy Everyone,
 I am caught in between two ideas.
 My first idea was spurred by the Smith article when it spoke of how nationalism and patriotism in Germany centered around praising ‘male courage’ and revering the ‘Fatherland’. It seems to me as if this discourse to describe nationalism in Germany is especially exclusive of women and there [...]

So, as of right now, I think I’m going to write about the mother-daughter relationship in “Snow White,” and look at how the role of women, and the ideal woman in Germany at the time influenced the relationship between snow white and her stepmother.

Hi all,
I’m writing about the gore in the Grimms Tales, and how it may have related to nationalism.  It’s been easy to suggest things, but I’m having trouble finding any really convincing links between the two.  I think, however, that this might be unavoidable – everything on a subject like this will be conjecture – [...]

I am going to write about “Hansel and Gretel” and how it negatively represents the poor and what this says about the ideal image of the German family unit. I am probably going to use the Taylor, Peter, and Hermann document as my research material in the essay as well as the Anderson and Gellner [...]

It looks like I am the only one so far planning to write about “Little Red Cap.” I found the interactions between the characters really interesting. Little Red Cap, her grandmother, and the wolf can be interpreted as belonging to an imagined social community, in the same way that Anderson defines the nation as “an [...]

I am going to write about gender roles in “The Frog King.” I will compare the prince and the king with the princess and see how the story reflects gender roles in German culture at the time. I believe that the characters fit into the gender specific roles of the time period in [...]

I’m still a little unsure of what I want to write about. The gender roles in the stories is something I’ve thought about and it seems a lot of other people have thought about, but how would we make that relate to German nationalism? I don’t want to stray too far from the prompt and [...]

I plan to write about how Snow White represents a patriarchal society, and how it spreads through all classes.  This ties into the basis of the German nation and the new gender definitions at the time.  I plan to use the sources on gender and the family to enhance my argument.