Queen's Mirror: Fairy Tales by German Women, 1780-1900

This exciting and comprehensive anthology-the first anthology of German women's fairy tales in English-presents a variety of published and archival fairy tales from 1780 to 1900. These authors of these stories used fairy tales to explain their own lives, to teach children, to examine history, and to critique society and the status quo. Powerful and conflicted females are queens, girls on quests, mothers, daughters, magical wisewomen, and midwives to the fairies; they love, hate, murder, save children, fight tyranny, overcome cannibals, and rescue the working poor. Jeannine Blackwell's introduction places the tales in their historical, social, and critical context, and Shawn C. Jarvis's afterword presents a thematic analysis of the texts and approaches to reading them in conjunction with other European and American tales. Shawn C. Jarvis is a professor of German and chair of Foreign Languages at St. Cloud State University. Jeannine Blackwell is a professor of German at the University of Kentucky, president of Women in German, and coeditor of Bitter Healing: German Women Writers, 1700-1830. An Anthology (Nebraska 1990).