Exoticised, but Not Exotic. Translated Collections of Slavic Fairy Tales and the Image of a Cultural Borderland
Exoticised, but Not Exotic. Translated Collections of Slavic Fairy Tales and the Image of a Cultural Borderland

Summary/Abstract: This article focuses on how the themes present in translated collections of Slavic fairy tales published in nineteenth-century London helped legitimise the image of the Slavic countries as a cultural borderland in the English imagination. Published collections of fairy tales generally targeted a wide and mixed audience composed of children, parents, and other specialised or non-specialised adults. However, supplementary information in introductions and annotations created a space where editors and translators could dictate the portrayal of the nation or cultures from which the tales originated, so that some, like Grimms’, integrated into British popular culture, while others, including fairy tales from Slavic Europe, remained on the fringes. Thus, a clear portrayal of a broadly Slavic culture as straddling the imagined East/West boundary appears in the century’s fairy tale collections. It was a literary and editorial process that colonised or other distinctly foreign cultures underwent as well, which allowed fairy tale collections to become another tool for imperial powers to determine whether another nation could be categorised as either Self or Other.

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