SOURCE: Morris-Keitel, Helen G. “The Audience Should Be King: Bettina Brentano-von Arnim's ‘Tale of the Lucky Purse.’” Marvels and Tales: Journal of Fairy-Tale Studies 11, nos. 1-2 (1997): 48-60.

In the following essay, Morris-Keitel considers “Tale of the Lucky Purse” as an example of a hybrid genre that combines a fairy-tale narrative and a dialogue with a royal audience.

Introduction: Social Prose of the Vormärz and the Fairy Tale

The 1840s in the German states can perhaps best be characterized as a period of potential and real transition. Physicists describe such phases as unstable and full of activity as individual elements or groups reconfigure themselves into an altered, more stable state. To many inhabitants of the German states in this period, major changes in the political and economic spheres and, thus, in the social structure appeared to be on the horizon. Indications of this imminent change appeared most visibly...