The Brothers Grimm and Their Critics

Christa Kamenetsky was a schoolchild in Germany during World War II. She studied at the universities of Kiel, Bremen, Freiburg, Central Michigan, Munich, and Washington. She is also the author of The Brothers Grimm and Their Critics: Folktales and the Quest for Meaning and was a professor of English at Central Michigan University, where she taught children's literature and comparative literature.

This new book is, to date, the most comprehensive study in English of the Grimms and their maerchen, and it is very likely the best. Believing the brothers' aims and methods to have been misunderstood, Christa Kamenetsky emphasizes their internationalism, their lack of dogmatism, their ties to the Romantic movement (especially their devotion to the ideal of Naturpoesie), and the relationship between Jacob's research on language and their ideas about the origin of the tales. [Kamenetsky] bases her assertions on the Grimms' own notes and commentary, which she claims to have been generally overlooked.