timelets

“In 1812, the first edition of their anthology, comprising eighty-six stories, came out in an edition of 600, with an apparatus of notes running to hundreds of pages. It was not really intended to be read for pleasure at all by the children and households of its title; it was a learned work setting out to reconfigure the cultural history of Germany along lines that would emancipate it from the monopoly of classical and French superiority. Yet this collection—by the final, standard edition of 1857 the number of tales had grown to 210—was to become the most widely translated work in the world after the Bible and the Qur’an, rendered into more than 160 languages so far, including Xhosa and Tagalog, and still counting.”
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"Germany wasn’t yet Germany. It was a congeries made up of dozens of principalities and archdukedoms, free Hanseatic ports and archbishoprics. History shows us that the modern nation-state develops long after a national culture and its language: think of Italy and of Dante, writing five hundred years before Italian unification. For centuries, “most of the peninsula had been under German or Austrian or Spanish rule, while the Renaissance, indisputably Italian, was influencing the whole world. The Grimms were living in a time of turmoil and bloodshed. ”
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“One response to humiliation is to assert cultural riches and distinctiveness, even pre-eminence. ”

--- Warner, Marina;. “Once upon a Time."