The Formation of Canon of German Fairy Tales (based on Grimm\'s Fairy Tales)

The subject of the investigation is fairy tales of the brothers Grimm, which could be called canonical. The aim of the paper is to establish the evolution of canonical fairy tales throughout all seven editions. The work includes the examination of the role of canonical fairy tales for the collection “Kinder- und Hausmärchen” (“Children's and family fairy tales”), their connection with non-canonical texts, typology. The transformation of each fairy tale was also analyzed at the different levels of the text: the lexical-syntactical level, the plot, the characterization of characters, the speech, time and space, style and genre. The results of the study are the identification of common elements for canonical and non-canonical texts, description and explanation of the reasons of the transformation of every fairy tale at the different levels and the establishment of techniques that were used in the case of the changes in the texts - replacement, reduction and addition.