The Mother Goose Translation Project

FAIN: FT-59688-12

Christine Anne Jones
University of Utah (Salt Lake City, UT 84112-9049)

Mother Goose Revisited, a volume of translations and commentaries, offers a wholly new perspective on Charles Perrault's Histoires ou contes du temps passe. I seek NEH funding to write annotations and 2 essays to accompany my translations in a scholarly publication. The essay on Perrault's 17th-century French context explores his stylistic affinities with other (women) writers in his intellectual circle. The essay on the 300-year reception history in Britain and North America which I will co-write shows how the Mother Goose tales have been used in the Anglophone world to carve out a normalizing role for fairy tales, the figure of Perrault, and women's place in narratives of heroism. Designed for university and high school classrooms, my new translation edition will be the first collection of Perrault's tales translated and annotated by a French fairy tale scholar and the first accompanied by a critical essay on the British/American reception and nationalist deployment of Mother Goose.