The rod-shaped nanoparticles of the widespread plant pathogen tobacco mosaic virus (TMV) have been a matter of intense debates and cutting-edge research for more than a hundred years. During the late 19th century, their behavior in filtration tests applied to the agent causing the 'plant mosaic disease' eventually led to the discrimination of viruses from bacteria. Thereafter, they promoted the development of biophysical cornerstone techniques such as electron microscopy and ultracentrifugation. Since the 1950s, the robust, helically arranged nucleoprotein complexes consisting of a single RNA and more than 2100 identical coat protein subunits have enabled molecular studies which have pioneered the understanding of viral replication and self-assembly, and elucidated major aspects of virus–host interplay, which can lead to agronomically relevant diseases. However, during the last decades, TMV has acquired a new reputation as a well-defined high-yield nanotemplate with multivalent protein surfaces, allowing for an ordered high-density presentation of multiple active molecules or synthetic compounds. Amino acid side chains exposed on the viral coat may be tailored genetically or biochemically to meet the demands for selective conjugation reactions, or to directly engineer novel functionality on TMV-derived nanosticks. The natural TMV size (length: 300 nm) in combination with functional ligands such as peptides, enzymes, dyes, drugs or inorganic materials is advantageous for applications ranging from biomedical imaging and therapy approaches over surface enlargement of battery electrodes to the immobilization of enzymes. TMV building blocks are also amenable to external control of in vitro assembly and re-organization into technically expedient new shapes or arrays, which bears a unique potential for the development of 'smart' functional 3D structures. Among those, materials designed for enzyme-based biodetection layouts, which are routinely applied, e.g., for monitoring blood sugar concentrations, might profit particularly from the presence of TMV rods: Their surfaces were recently shown to stabilize enzymatic activities upon repeated consecutive uses and over several weeks. This review gives the reader a ride through strikingly diverse achievements obtained with TMV-based particles, compares them to the progress with related viruses, and focuses on latest results revealing special advantages for enzyme-based biosensing formats, which might be of high interest for diagnostics employing 'systems-on-a-chip'.

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Novel roles for well-known players: from tobacco mosaic virus pests to enzymatically active assemblies.

Fairy-tale adaptations and economies of desire

Tradition and Innovation in Folk Literature

Introduction In discussions of fairy-tale retellings, the concept of intertextuality is often introduced to explain the relationship between a retelling and the traditional fairy tale(s) to which it refers.1 Although the notion of intertextuality was developed by scholars such as Julia Kristeva, Roland Barthes, and Gerard Genette as a far more expansive network of verbal and even nonverbal texts, it is conventionally employed in literary studies to analyze the relationships and dynamics between fictional texts only. If we adopt a broader concept of intertextuality, one that considers not only fictional but also nonfictional pre-texts, a whole new intertextual dimension becomes accessible. For fairy-tale studies, such an approach offers valuable possibilities, especially when it comes to the interaction between fairy tales and the critical and theoretical discourses that have the fairy tale as their subject. Various thematic overlaps and mutual concerns can be perceived between fairy-tale retellings and feminist, psychoanalytic, and Marxist criticism so that fairy-tale criticism appears as a relevant intertext for the retellings, and vice versa.2 In this essay 1 will explore the intertextual dialogue between a selection of fairy-tale retellings from Dutch, German, and English writers and the sociohistorical study of the Grimm brothers' fairy tales. 1 will demonstrate how certain retellings have helped to undermine the Grimms' authority as truthful and reliable folktale collectors, moving on to analyze in more detail retellings that seek an alliance with criticism on the oral tradition underpinning the Grimm collection. In Search of the Truth As the best-known collection of fairy tales worldwide, Jacob and Wilhelm Grimms' Kinder- und Hausmarchen (Children's and Household Tales) has been a popular topic of research. In the course of the twentieth century the editorial process of the Brothers Grimm came under discussion at various times and in various contexts. At the beginning of the twentieth century the first academic publications had already appeared on the editions of Die Kinder- und Hausmarchen, and the question of editorial changes remained on the agenda throughout the century3 In 1975 Heinz Rolleke sparked new interest in the collection's genesis when he published Die alteste Marchensammlung der Bruder Gnmm, an annotated edition of the Olenberg manuscript from 1810, printed next to the tales as they appeared in the first published edition from 1812. This manuscript contains a handful of earlier versions of the Grimm tales as the Grimms had assembled them for their contemporary Clemens Brentano. The manuscript and subsequent published editions of the tales were the topic of further research by scholars such as Siegfried Neumann, Eric Hulsens, John Ellis, Ruth B. Bottigheimer, Klaus Doderer, Wilhelm Solms, Jack Zipes, and Maria Tatar. Writing in 1983, Jack Zipes states that "[u]ntil the 1970s it was generally assumed that the Brothers Grimm collected their oral folktales mainly from peasants and day laborers and that they merely altered and refined the tales while remaining true to their perspective and meaning. Both assumptions proved to be false" (Subversion 61). A substantial number of articles and books have addressed the issue of whether the Brothers Grimm "merely refined" the oral versions they had collected or whether they (un)consciously manipulated them in favor of their own ideology and literary taste. Although Zipes claims that the Grimms did change the meaning of the oral folktales, he stresses that their "intentions were honorable" (61) and that "there is no evidence to indicate that the Grimms consciously sought to dupe German readers and feed them lies about the German past" (Brothers Gnmm 110). He refers here to the impression that the Brothers Grimm created of their tales being German stories when several of the best-known tales in their collection have older variants from Italy and France. …

Back to Ölenberg: An Intertextual Dialogue between Fairy-Tale Retellings and the Sociohistorical Study of the Grimm Tales

The frog princess

During the past twenty years or so, the question concerning the origin of the motif of a princess kissing a frog has been raised in a number of exchanges among literary scholars and folklorists, including Charles C. Doyle, Donald Haase, Maria Tatar, Hans-Jorg Uther, Jack Zipes, and me. The question is, Does the motif come from the Grimm fairy tale "The Frog King" (KHM 1, ATU 440), which may have influenced the modem proverb "You have to kiss a lot of frogs (or toads) before you meet your handsome prince"? All of us have tried to solve this matter, with my friend Don finally writing to me on February 7, 2012: "It's still a mystery to me, but the kiss must have occurred first in one of the 19th-century English translations, don't you think?" This conjecture makes considerable sense in light of the fact that there is no kissing scene in the Grimm tale. This also explains why much of the scholarship on the fairy tale is mute regarding the transformation of the frog into a prince by way of a princess's kiss (Rohrich, "Das Froschkonig-Marchen"; "Mit dem Froschkonig ins Bett"). In fact, a kiss is actually mentioned only in those studies that present modem parodie adaptations of the fairy tale in prose or rhyme, but such compilations do not offer any explanations for where the kiss motif comes from (Mieder, "Modem Anglo-American Variants"; Rohrich, "Der Froschkonig und seine Wandlungen," "Froschkonig," "Der Froschkonig: Das erste Marchen der Grimm," "Der Froschkonig: Rezeption"). In the two encyclopedia articles I have written on "The Frog King" I do mention the infamous kiss. However, the more detailed research shared in the present essay will show that my earlier claim-that in most English versions of the tale the frog is kissed by the princess-no longer holds (Mieder, "The Frog King," "Frog King"). Moreover, my current research supports the hypothesis that the motif of the kiss originates in the proverb and not the tale. As it turns out, that kiss is much more complicated than scholars have assumed.The most comprehensive study of "The Frog King" is Lutz Rohrich's detailed and richly illustrated book Wage es, den Frosch zu kussen! Das Grimmsche Marchen Nummer Eins in seinen Wandlungen (Dare to Kiss the Frog! The Grimm Fairy Tale Number One and Its Variants"), whose catchy title must have surprised quite a few of his German readers. After all, they know of no kissing scene in the actual Grimm fairy tale. However, by 1986 the modem American proverb "You have to kiss a lot of frogs before you meet your handsome prince" had become a common loan expression translated into German. And this resulted in a wave of often sexually allusive cartoons, comic strips, slogans, aphorisms, advertisements, and literary reworkings that eventually had their effect on the German fairy tale. Because Rohrich knew that his German readers had started to link the new proverbial wisdom with the traditional fairy tale, thereby replacing the scene of the princess throwing the frog against the wall with her actually kissing it, his provocative title was perfectly reasonable. His remarkable book also gives at least a partial answer to the vexing question of how the kiss motif became associated with the "Frog King" fairy tale.Rohrich reprints the texts of the fairy tale as it is cited by the Brothers Grimm in their manuscript from 1810, in the first published version of 1812, and the final rendering in the seventh edition of the Kinderund Hausmarchen of 1857 (Rohrich, Wage es, den Frosch zu kussen, 76-81). In all accounts the disgusted princess grabs the ugly frog and throws him against the wall, thus liberating herself from his ever more demanding advances. The sexual undertones of this scene in the princess's bedroom are more obvious in a variant of the tale that the Brothers Grimm published as number 13 in the second volume of their collection in 1815. Here the frog sleeps at her feet at the foot of her bed for two nights in a row. On the third evening the frog sleeps under her pillow, and when the princess wakes up in the morning, a handsome prince stands in front of her. …

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"You Have to Kiss a Lot of Frogs (Toads) Before You Meet Your Handsome Prince": From Fairy-Tale Motif to Modern Proverb

The Poets' Grimm: 20th Century Poems from Grimm Fairy Tales. Edited by Jeanne Marie Beaumont and Claudia Carlson. Ashland, OR: Story Line Press, 2003. 287 pp. This anthology of twentieth-century fairy-tale poems is a publishing desideratum finally come true. My own compilation entitled Disenchantments: An Anthology of Modern Fairy Tale Poetry (Hanover, NH: UP of New England, 1985) has been out of print for a number of years, and it was high time that someone undertook the necessary task of editing a new collection of this fascinating subgenre of lyric poetry. Jeanne Marie Beaumont and Claudia Carlson have put together a superb anthology and they are to be commended for their careful and sensitive selection of poems. They have purposely stayed away from duplicating authors and poems from my earlier anthology. In fact, only 14 of the 78 authors included in Disenchantments also appear (usually with different texts) in The Poets' Grimm, with the latter volume featuring poems by 112 poets. This handsomely produced book with its fairy-tale-like low price is thus a treasure throve of fairy-tale poetry, a volume designed for the general reader but also most suitable for the classroom. Disenchantments had found considerable use in English and folklore classes, especially in Women's Studies courses, Honors programs, and first-year special topics seminars. There is no doubt that this new and more comprehensive anthology would be a perfect textbook, and I hasten to urge its adaptation both on the advanced high school and college level. The two editors provide a mere six-page introduction, arguing convincingly that earlier fairy-tale poetry usually consisted of retellings of commonly known fairy tales, to wit poems by Alfred Tennyson, Bret Harte, John Greenleaf Whittier, and James Whitcomb. This modus operandi changed at the beginning of the twentieth century, when poets well versed in the fairy-tale tradition started to reinterpret the tales or parts of them in innovative and thought-provoking fashion. As I have argued in my entry on "Poetry and Fairy Tales" in Jack Zipes's The Oxford Companion to Fairy Tales (Oxford: Oxford UP, 2000), "the basic message of most 20th-century poems based on or at least alluding to fairy tales is one that this is a world of problems and frustrations, where nothing works out and succeeds as in these beautiful stories of ages past. And yet, by composing their poems around fairy-tale motifs, these authors if only very indirectly seem to long for that miraculous transformation to bliss and happiness" (388). This is certainly very obvious in the fairy-tale poems of some of the best English-language poets as, for example, Randall Jarrell, Anne Sexton, Sara Henderson Hay, Olga Broumas, Hayden Carruth, Louise Gluck, Galway Kinnell, Maxine Kumin, Lisel Mueller, Allen Tate, and Jane Yolen. As expected, these poets are represented in The Poets' Grimm, but the editors have also included many less-known poets, among them Regie Cabico, Mike Carlin, Anna Denise, Meg Kearney, Elline Lipkin, Margaret Rockwell, Maria Tarrone, and Estha Weiner. For the most part, these poets and the many other authors who have written one or more fairy-tale poems reinterpret the Grimm tales in a humorous, parodie (at times nonsensical), ironical, cynical, or satirical fashion, thereby turning the positive wisdom of the tales into so-called anti-fairy tales. The themes of the poems are as universal as the insights into the human condition expressed in the traditional tales. Every imaginable human or social problem is treated, from love to hate, from politics to war, from marriage to divorce, from decency to criminality, and from sexual politics to emancipation. But there are also themes of deception, vanity, loneliness, manipulation, lovelessness, manipulation, frustration, and power. The happy ending of the fairy tales is transformed to express the complexities and anxieties of the modern age that seems far removed from the world of fairy tales. …

Wolfgang Mieder

Papers

"You Have to Kiss a Lot of Frogs (Toads) Before You Meet Your Handsome Prince": From Fairy-Tale Motif to Modern Proverb

The Poets' Grimm: 20th Century Poems from Grimm Fairy Tales (review)