Masters Theses

Date of Award

8-1994

Degree Type

Thesis

Degree Name

Master of Arts

Major

German

Major Professor

John C. Osborne

Committee Members

Bevery Moser, Carloyn Hodges

Abstract

This research explains changes in the role, function and significance of the forest motif in the German Volksmärchen and Kunstm&amul;rchen. During the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century in Germany, collectors of Volksm&amul;rchen believed that these tales had been passed down orally through many generations, and had their roots in a Golden Age of humankind. They believed that the "one- dimensional" setting of the Volksm&amul;rchen, in which the magical and the mundane coexist, was a representation of this earlier, "purer" time. Collectors of the Volksm&amul;rchen hoped that by preserving the tales, they were preserving a link to the lost Golden Age in which they were produced.

The authors of the Kunstm&amul;rchen, on the other hand, were trying to show readers a world closer to their own. They portray a world torn in two, in which the magical, poetic world of the fairy tale is juxtaposed with the everyday, modern world. The world within the forest represents the fairy-tale world, and the everyday world is represented by the world outside the forest. The protagonist is often caught between these two "worlds."

In choosing the forest, a dominant motif in theVolksmärchen, the authors of the Kunstm&amul;rchenimmediately characterize the second world as m&amul;rchenhaft, magical and fundamentally different from the everyday world of modern men and women. The fairy-tale world within the forest represents the Golden Age which enlightened individuals have lost, but for which they continue to long.

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