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The Queen''s Mirror: Fairy Tales by German Women, 1780-1900. (Reviews).(Book Review)-

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The Queen's Mirror: Fairy Tales by German Women, 1780-1900. Edited and translated by Shawn C. Jarvis and Jeannine Blackwell. European Women Writers Series. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2001. xii + 374 pp.

As a result of their centuries-long dominance of public awareness as well as their being the recurring object of scholarly effort and cinematic adaptation, the fairy tales of Charles Perrault and the Brothers Grimm have functioned as models of what the fairy tale was thought to be. In the late twentieth century, however, this dominance began to fade (at least within scholarly circles) as an alternative fairy-tale literature gained attention. As a major impulse in this redefinition of focus, Jack Zipes's anthology, Beauties, Beasts and Enchantments: Classic French Fairy Tales (1989), offered new English translations of French literary fairy tales, written primarily by women who were contemporaneous with or subsequent to Perrault. By incorporating the word "classic" into his subtitle, Zipes acknowledges these women's contributions to the fairy-tale canon.

In their anthology, Bitter Healing: German Women Writers from 1700-1830 (1990), Jeannine Blackwell and Susanne Zantos point out that in the field of German literature in general, women authors have been "more consistently excluded from the canon than in England, France, or...