[Folkserv] 4-13 talk on publishing German fairy tales in the post-war US

[Noyes, Dorothy]

“Pantheon Books and Illustrated German Tales”
Vance Byrd<https://arth.sas.upenn.edu/people/vance-byrd>
Presidential Associate Professor of German
University of Pennsylvania
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April 13, 2023
2:30-4:30pm

Derby Hall 029
main campus



The United States has been an important market for illustrated German literature in translation since the late eighteenth century, and these editions helped readers forge and maintain cultural and linguistic bonds to the broader German diasporic community. In this presentation, I will investigate what it meant for a prominent publisher of European literature to reach American readers in the final years of World War II. I will focus on the publication history and visual aesthetics of Helen and Kurt Wolff’s Pantheon Books, Inc., editions of Grimm’s Fairy Tales (1944) and Stifter’s Rock Crystal (1945), to set into relief how these illustrated nineteenth-century German children’s tales were part of a political market strategy presenting universal moral values and innocence at a moment when the world did not look that way anymore. I will ask what it meant to be determined publishers in the midst of despair and how their complicated decisions during this pivotal period smoothed the way for German literature in the post-World War II American market.

Vance Byrd
Presidential Associate Professor of Germanic Languages and Literatures
Secondary Appointment, History of Art
Department of Francophone, Italian, and Germanic Studies
University of Pennsylvania
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germanic.osu.edu

  The Ohio State University - College of Arts and Sciences
  German  |  Swedish  |  Yiddish  |  Scandinavian Studies
 Department of Germanic Languages and Literatures
  498 Hagerty Hall  | 1775 College Rd S  |  Columbus OH 43210  |  USA

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