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367 Notes introduction 1. Claudio Guillén, The Challenge of Comparative Literature, trans. Cola Franzen (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1993), 3. For a recent sketch of how comparative literature has evolved, see Jan M. Ziolkowski, “Always Beyond Compare: The Past, Present, and Future of Comparative Literature,” Journal X: A Journal in Culture and Criticism 8 (2004): 115–35. 2. See the essays collected in Jan M. Ziolkowski, ed., On Philology (University Park, PA: Penn State Press, 1990), and see the précis of subsequent developments in Jan M. Ziolkowski , “Metaphilology,” Journal of English and Germanic Philology 104 (2005): 239–72. 3. The New York Times carried an article entitled “America Yawns at Foreign Fiction ” by Stephen Kinzer on 26 July 2003 (late edition-final, section B, p. 7, column 1), on how few foreign-language books are translated annually into English. 4. A key enunciation of views in favor of a “world literature” was Erich Auerbach, “Philology and Weltliteratur,” trans. Maire Said and Edward Said, Centennial Review 13 (1969), originally published as “Philologie der Weltliteratur,” in Weltliteratur: Festgabe für Fritz Strich zum 70. Geburtstag, ed. Walter Muschg and Emil Staiger (Bern: Francke Verlag, 1952), 39–50. How broadly the world was defined by those who spoke of “world literature” is another question. 5. See Vladimir IAkovlevich Propp, La fiaba russa: Lezioni inedite, ed. and trans. Franca Crestani (Turin: Giulio Einaudi editore, 1990), 111. For a dazzling exploration of the wisdom that has often been associated with women storytellers and with female figures within fairy tales, see Marina Warner, From the Beast to the Blonde: On Fairy Tales and Their Tellers (New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 1994). 6. In making the second part of this assertion, I am influenced by Otto Rank (1884– 1939). See his The Myth of the Birth of the Hero, and Other Writings, ed. Philip Freund (New York: Knopf, 1932). 7. These tales have slipped between the cracks and have not been covered even in such valuable books as James M. McGlathery’s edited volume The Brothers Grimm and Folktale (Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1988). 8. For the fullest coverage of such issues at present, see Rudolf Schenda, Von Mund zu Ohr: Bausteine einer Kulturgeschichte volkstümlichen Erzählens in Europa (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck und Ruprecht, 1993). No comparable work focused on premodern times has yet been produced. I took a very small and tentative step toward a study of one of these groups in my “Old Wives’ Tales: Classicism and Anticlassicism from Apuleius to Chaucer,” Journal of Medieval Latin 12 (2002): 90–113. 9. The term classic fairy tales has been applied to fairy tales at least four times in titles or subtitles of highly influential anthologies: compare, first, Iona Opie and Peter Opie, The Classic Fairy Tales (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 1974); later, Jack Zipes, trans., Beauties, Beasts, and Enchantment: Classic French Fairy Tales (New York: Meridian, 1991); and, most recently, Maria Tatar, ed., The Classic Fairy Tales (New York and London: W. W. Norton, 1999), and Maria Tatar, ed., The Annotated Classic Fairy Tales (New York and London: W. W. Norton, 2002). 10. Croce made very apparent his resistance to what he considered arbitrary theories , “those of Indian origins or of primitive or savage origins insofar as reflecting the customs of distant times, or of mythological-naturalistic origins” [quelle dell’origine indiana o dell’origine primitiva o selvaggia in quanto riflesso del costume di età remote, o della origine mitologico-naturalistica] (Benedetto Croce, introduction to Il pentamerone , ossia la fiaba delle fiabe, by Giambattista Basile [Bari: Gius. Laterza e Figli, 1925], 1:XXXI). 11. Croce (introduction to Il pentamerone, 1:XXXII) observed, “So too the question of the origins of folktales is to be changed from now on into the history of each one of them, which is then, at each of its stages, that of creation anew” [Anche la questione dell’origine delle fiabe è da convertire ormai nella storia di ciascuna di esse, che è poi, a ogni suo passo, quella di una creazione a nuovo]. 12. If such a basic principle requires scholarly support, I invoke Satu Apo, “The Two Worlds of the Finnish Fairytale: Observations on the Folk and Literary Fairytale Tradition of the 19th Century,” Arv: Scandinavian Yearbook of Folklore 44 (1988): 47: “Every magic tale narrator was guided by his own particular and general culture in constructing his narrative world. In other words, he was tied to his own time, sex...

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