Early Career Fellow in Research Area 4: "Literary Currencies"

June–July 2025 

Popular Antiquities Before the Grimms: Obsolescence and Recovery

Since the 1810s, the Brothers Grimms' edition of "Deutsche Sagen" or "German legends" has been counted as a justifiably canonical anthology of 'folk literature'. However, rather than building a canon of existing folkloric texts, this project studies the Grimms' collection as a distorting and rather misleading collection of pan-European material of generally unclear origins. This project examines the various origins of the texts the Grimms' presented and is particularly interested in tracing back philologically how their original sources became rewritten, amended and abridged through each layer of reception all the way to their edition. Currently, the project focus lies on studying the notion of calendrical knowledge in the Grimm corpus and how it compares to historical 15^th and 16^th century sources and the concrete uses of calendrical knowledge for everyday tasks. Such comparisons will further help to establish a concept of the state of popular literatures pre-1800, which this project terms "popular antiquities" in differentiation to the ca. 1830s notion of "folklore" or "Volksliteratur" that generally does not go beyond the Grimms’ canon.

Florian Fuchs is a Permanent Research Scholar in the German Department at Princeton University. His primary fields of research are comparative literature, media studies, art history and the history of ideas from the 16th to the 21st century. He is the author of Civic Storytelling: The Rise of Short Forms and the Agency of Literature (Zone Books), which studies short form narratives since the 1700s to develop a practice theory of literature. He is the co-editor (and co-translator) of History, Metaphors, Fable: A Hans Blumenberg Reader (Cornell UP) and the co-editor of Below Genre: Short Forms and their Affordances (Special Issue Colloquia Germanica).