Preface to the Special Issue in Honor of Donald Haase

It gives me great pleasure to write the preface to this special issue of Marvels & Tales dedicated to the work of Donald Haase. I was fortunate enough to be taken under Don’s wing upon my arrival at Wayne State University in the fall of 1999, and I have had the opportunity to collaborate with him on various projects ever since. Through his editorial work on Marvels & Tales, the Wayne State University Press Series in Fairy-Tale Studies, and his anthologies and encyclopedia work, Haase has contributed to the field of fairy-tale studies in so many ways. One important way has been his encouragement of a new and upcoming generation of fairy-tale scholars, including Vanessa Joosen and Jeana Jorgensen, both of whom have essays in this volume. With his impeccable editorial skills and theoretical finesse, Haase has provided innumerable opportunities for scholars to explore new areas of research in the field through his edited volumes The Reception of the Grimms’ Fairy Tales: Responses, Reactions, Revisions (1993) and Fairy Tales and Feminism: New Approaches (2004), as well as through innovative special issues of Marvels & Tales, including “Erotic Tales” (2008) and most recently “The Fairy Tale in Japan” (2013) with guest editor Marc Sebastian-Jones. Finally, Haase has been able to internationalize his important and much needed work on the interrelationship between folklore and literary studies through his involvement in various advisory boards, including the Sussex Centre for Folklore, Fairy Tales, and Fantasy, and in his capacity as the vice-president representing North America for the International Society for Folk Narrative Research.

A comparatist at heart, Haase’s earliest publications straddle the fairy-tale traditions of nineteenth-century Germany and France. Haase has been interested in questions related to reception from his earliest work, evident in his studies concerning the reception of German Romantic writers, most notably Novalis, in France and in the works of French writer Gérard de Nerval. The ways in which tales and writers cross borders is foregrounded in his work on what Haase has dubbed the “exile märchen,” that is, tales written by German émigrés such as Thomas Theodor Heine, who fled Germany with the rise of National Socialism. In related work Haase examines the function of the fairy tale as it relates to war and trauma in pieces dealing with war, children, and the Holocaust. Haase also has had a long-standing interest in filmic and television adaptations of fairy tales.

Whether discussing the Grimms or fairy-tale films, Haase has been insistent on the need to problematize the conception of folktales and fairy tales as ageless expressions of universal truths whose authentic roots reside with the folk. This problematization comes in various forms. For instance, in his piece “Yours, Mine, or Ours? Perrault, the Brothers Grimm, and the Ownership of Fairy Tales,” Haase criticizes the notion of the folktale or fairy tale as “national property” or the property of “a single group” (Classic Fairy Tales, 355). In the introduction to The Reception of the Grimms’ Fairy Tales, Haase opens with a most untraditional incarnation of “Hansel and Gretel” in the experimental art of Laurie Anderson in order to demonstrate that “Hansel and Gretel—along with other fairy-tale characters—may live on, but they do not always play the parts given them by the Grimms” (Reception, 9). And for Haase that’s okay. Every new incarnation of a particular tale—good or bad, artistic or consumer driven—“reflects the specific values of its creator” or creators (“Gold into Straw,” 193). As such, Haase can both accept the Disney film as a legitimate iteration of a fairy tale and criticize it for its ideological impact without, however, resorting to notions of source, folk, or authenticity, because such concepts potentially delegitimize any modernizing or experimental use of folktales and fairy tales.

Such theorizing of the genre takes interesting shape in two pieces that challenge the stability and understanding of folktale and fairy-tale texts. In “Hypertextual Gutenberg: The Textual and Hypertextual Life of Folktales and Fairy Tales in English-Language Popular Print Editions,” Haase discusses the ways in which certain print editions of tales “de-center the folktale text, discourage sequential reading” by adding commentary and images that function as “links” that “approximate the virtual proximity and convenience of the electronic hyperlink” (228). Such a formatting complicates our understanding of a tale by adding multiple layers of texts, contexts, and images that feed into our understanding and our experience of a particular tale.

In one of my favorite pieces, “Decolonizing Fairy-Tale Studies,” Haase takes on the work of Jonathan Gotschall. Haase challenges Gotschall’s literary Darwinist approach and his uncritical use of exclusively public domain fairy-tale collections from around the world on which he bases his universalizing concepts about gender. As Haase eloquently demonstrates, Gotschall fails to take into account the conditions of production and the sociopolitical contexts of these folklore collections, many of which were translated, adapted, and edited for a mostly Western European audience at a time of colonial domination. That collecting involves a process of inclusion and exclusion, that translating involves choices that cannot be separated from the translator’s preconceptions and prejudices, and that adaptation molds texts to an intended audience’s taste and expectations—all this needs to be taken into account, but it is not acknowledged at all in Gotschall’s supposedly “scientific” study. Drawing from the work of Sadhana Naithani on folk-loristics in the colonial era, Haase challenges Gotschall’s positing of an unmediated and unideologically driven corpus to make his universalist claims about beauty—and consequently, gender—in folktales. Perhaps Gotschall would have done well to read Haase’s much cited chapter “Feminist Fairy-Tale Scholarship” in Fairy Tales and Feminism in which Haase emphasizes that, although their works did not always make it into widely disseminated collections of tales, female fairy-tale writers from seventeenth-and eighteenth-century France, eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Germany, and nineteenth-century England regularly challenged gender norms prevalent in fairy tales penned by male writers.

Much like Joseph Jacobs, whose two collections of tales he has edited, Haase questions traditional delineations and hierarchies within the field of folktale and fairy-tale studies in which scholars tend to privilege in terms of authenticity oral over written tales, book culture over film, and print texts over hypertexts. Throughout his scholarship, Haase paints a much more complex picture of folktale and fairy-tale traditions, which consist of networks of connections that move back and forth between, for instance, written and oral, film and literature. This movement across different media is not teleological or irreversible, in the sense of being “capable of changing or producing a change in one direction only” (American Heritage Dictionary); rather, it is a back-and-forth movement between different mediums of expressions, not to mention between different folktale and fairy-tale traditions. Moreover, such networks are grounded in sociohistorical, political, technological, and cultural contexts that mediate not only how different readers understand a specific folktale or fairy tale but also how different tellers tell them. These insights mark Haase’s significant contributions to the field, which feed into the framework of his edited volumes as well as The Greenwood Encyclopedia of Folktales and Fairy Tales.

Each of the essays in this volume engages with Haase’s scholarship in different ways. Drawing from Haase’s work on the reception of Grimm tales, Vanessa Joosen examines the tendency in Dutch translations and adaptations to sentimentalize “Snow White” before the appearance of Disney’s sentimentalizing film. In his contribution Jack Zipes continues the work exemplified in Reception of the Grimms’ Fairy Tales by examining the post-1993 German reception and adaptation of Grimm tales; Sadhana Naithani and Wolfgang Mieder more generally engage with Haase’s work on the Grimms, and Ulrich Marzolph revisits the place of The Arabian Nights in the Grimms’ corpus and reflects on, like Naithani and Haase, the historicizing of our disciplinary knowledge. For her part, Jeana Jorgensen’s quantitative study of Grimm tales connects with Haase’s “Decolonizing Fairy-Tale Studies” to distinguish her study from the problematic work of Gottschall. Although the impact of Haase’s scholarship on research on the Grimms is most evident, his influence is apparent in other areas as well. Maria Tatar’s piece on “Sleeping Beauty” draws from Haase’s analysis of the self-reflexivity of the tale in different traditions. Taking his cue from Haase’s “Hypertextual Gutenberg,” Francisco Vaz da Silva examines variations in motifs of European Cinderella tales as so many “intertexts” that inform our knowledge of the specific tale tradition. Together the essays in this special issue of Marvels & Tales foreground the significance of Donald Haase’s work within the field of fairy-tale studies.