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  • Published: 22 April 2015
  • ISBN: 9780143107422
  • Imprint: Penguin Classics
  • Format: Paperback
  • Pages: 288
  • RRP: $35.00
Categories:

The Turnip Princess and Other Newly Discovered Fairy Tales



A literary discovery: a fascinating new trove of fairy tales by a contemporary of the Brothers Grimm that revolutionizes our understanding of the form

A Penguin Classic

A rare discovery in the world of fairy tales—now for the first time in English

Move over, Cinderella: Make way for the Turnip Princess! And for the “Cinderfellas” in these stories, which turn our understanding of gender in fairy tales on its head.

With this volume, the holy trinity of fairy tales—the Brothers Grimm, Charles Perrault, and Hans Christian Andersen—becomes a quartet. In the 1850s, Franz Xaver von Schönwerth traversed the forests, lowlands, and mountains of northern Bavaria to record fairy tales, gaining the admiration of even the Brothers Grimm. Most of Schönwerth's work was lost—until a few years ago, when thirty boxes of manu­scripts were uncovered in a German municipal archive. Now, for the first time, Schönwerth's lost fairy tales are available in English. Violent, dark, and full of action, and upending the relationship between damsels in distress and their dragon-slaying heroes, these more than seventy stories bring us closer than ever to the unadorned oral tradition in which fairy tales are rooted, revolutionizing our understanding of a hallowed genre.

For more than seventy years, Penguin has been the leading publisher of classic literature in the English-speaking world. With more than 1,500 titles, Penguin Classics represents a global bookshelf of the best works throughout history and across genres and disciplines. Readers trust the series to provide authoritative texts enhanced by introductions and notes by distinguished scholars and contemporary authors, as well as up-to-date translations by award-winning translators.

  • Published: 22 April 2015
  • ISBN: 9780143107422
  • Imprint: Penguin Classics
  • Format: Paperback
  • Pages: 288
  • RRP: $35.00
Categories:

Other books in the series

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Love
Annals
Military Dispatches

Praise for The Turnip Princess and Other Newly Discovered Fairy Tales

"Schönwerth's tales have a compositional fierceness and energy rarely seen in stories gathered by the Brothers Grimm or Charles Perrault." --The New Yorker

"[This] new collection of German folk stories . . . challenges preconceptions about many of the most commonly known fairytales. . . . Many of the stories centre around surprisingly emancipated female characters." --The Guardian

"Schönwerth's legacy counts as the most significant collection in the German-speaking world in the nineteenth century." --Daniel Drascek, University of Regensburg