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• Folklore, Nonhuman Animals and Social Darwinism

  283-298

  Nidhi Mathur

  Shailesh Kumar Ray

  Views:

  148

  This article deals with the critical analysis of the selected Grimm’s fairy tales in the context of social Darwinism. First, a brief overview of the term and its historical background is provided. Furthermore, this article looks at various ideas that social Darwinian thinkers have used and presented over time. After that, the article will present the connection between social Darwinism and Grimm's fairy tales. The fairy tales of the Brothers Grimm included in the analysis include: The Fox and the Cat, The Wolf and the Fox, The Wren and the Bear. The fairy tales selected are viewed in this article through the lens of the ‘theriocentric-animalist perspective’, since the anthropocentric reading provides fairy tale animals only in terms of 'character masks of human characteristics', hence the fairy tale animals are forced to 'disappear'. This article argues that the Grimm’s Märchen are antithesis to ‘survival of the fittest’.

• Hannā Diyāb’s “A Sultan of Samarcand”, an Eleventh-Century Old Georgian St. George Legend, and the Construction of an Early Modern Fairy Tale

  7-22

  Ruth B. Bottigheimer

  Views:

  164

  Of the sixteen stories Hannā Diyāb told Antoine Galland to help the elderly scholar complete his 12-volume Mille et Une Nuits (1704–1717) six were omitted. This article examines one of the six discarded tales, “A Sultan of Samarcand”. Rediscovered by Hermann Zotenberg in the late 1880s, translated soon there­after into English by Richard Burton, it was contextualized historically as a product of Eastern Christian narrative tradition by Joseph Szövérffy in 1956 and categorized typologically by him within the Aarne–Thompson tale-type index, as it then existed. Kevin Tuite’s recent research and translation of an eleventh-century Georgian religious legend supports my hypothesis that the Christian St. George legend supplied the story’s core episode. The role of reference works is introduced inter alia to illuminate their role within knowledge creation in general and in the discontinuities of “A Sultan of Samarcand” research in particular.

• Marginalized Texts of a Glorified Genre: The Valorization of the (Folk)tale in Hungary

  23-42

  Judit Gulyás

  Views:

  180

  Attention towards and interest in the genre of the tale began rather belatedly in Hungarian culture. The paper provides a concise overview of the history of assigning value to this narrative genre: how it transformed from a trivial genre of idle amusement of the uneducated people into a precious cultural item that is an essential part of national heritage being safeguarded and studied from a number of perspectives. Parallel with the rise of the genre, a decline of the earliest known tales has taken place due to certain authenticity criteria retrospectively applied by newly formed disciplines as well as the standardization and naturalization of a specific mode of narration.