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"The stories in the Grimm brothers' Kinder- und Hausmärchen (Children's and Household Tales), first published in 1812 and 1815, have come to define academic and popular understandings of the fairy tale genre. Yet over a period of forty years, the brothers, especially Wilhelm, revised, edited, sanitized, and bowdlerized the tales, publishing the seventh and final edition in 1857 with many of the sexual implications removed. However, the contributors in Transgressive Tales: Queering the Grimms demonstrate that the Grimms and other collectors paid less attention to ridding the tales of non-heterosexual implications and that, in fact, the Grimms' tales are rich with queer possibilities. Editors Kay Turner and Pauline Greenhill introduce the volume with an overview of the tales' literary and interpretive history, surveying their queerness in terms of not just sex, gender and sexuality, but also issues of marginalization, oddity, and not fitting into society. In three thematic sections, contributors then consider a range of tales and their queer themes. In Faux Femininities, essays explore female characters, and their relationships and feminine representation in the tales. Contributors to Revising Rewritings consider queer elements in rewritings of the Grimms' tales, including Angela Carter's The Bloody Chamber, Jeanette Winterson's Twelve Dancing Princesses, and contemporary reinterpretations of both 'Snow White' and 'Snow White and Rose Red.' Contributors in the final section, Queering the Tales, consider queer elements in some of the Grimms' original tales and explore intriguing issues of gender, biology, patriarchy, and transgression."--Publisher description Introduction: once upon a queer time /Kay Turner and Pauline Greenhill --Whetting her appetite: what's a "clever" woman to do in the Grimms' collection? /Cristina Bacchilega --Nurtured in a lonely place: the wise woman as type in "The goose girl at the spring" /Kevin Goldstein --Queering kinship in "The maiden who seeks her brothers" /Jeana Jorgensen --"But who are you really?": ambiguous bodies and ambiguous pronouns in "Allerleirauh" /Margaret R. Yocom --A desire for death: the Grimms' Sleeping Beauty in The bloody chamber /Kimberly J. Lau --Happily ever after, according to our tastes: Jeanette Winterson's "Twelve dancing princesses" and queer possibility /Jennifer Orme --The lost sister: lesbian eroticism and female empowerment in "Snow White and Rose Red" /Andrew J. Friedenthal --Queering gender: transformations in "Peg Bearskin," "La Poiluse," and related tales /Pauline Greenhill, Anita Best, and Emilie Anderson-Grégoire --The true (false) bride and the false (true) bridegroom: "Fitcher's bird" and gendered virtue and villainy /Catherine Tosenberger --Becoming-mouse, becoming-man: the sideways growth of Princess Mouseskin /Joy Brooke Fairfield --Playing with fire: transgression as truth in Grimms' "Frau Trude" /Kay Turner --Destroying patriarchy to save it: Safdár Tawakkolí's Afghan boxwoman /Margaret A. Mills --"The grave mound": a queer adaptation /Elliot Gordon Mercer --Appendix: trans and drag in traditional folktales.
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