Fairy Tales, Sexuality, and Gender in France, 1690–1715

Between 1690 and 1715, well over one hundred literary fairy tales appeared in France, two-thirds of them written by women. This book explores why fashionable adults were attracted to this new literary genre and, integrating socio-historical, structuralist, and post-structuralist approaches, considers how it became a medium for reconceiving literary and historical discourses of sexuality and gender. The first part of the book considers how the marvellous is used to legitimize the genre, to exemplify theories of ‘modern’ culture, and to reaffirm women’s potential as writers. The second part examines how specific groups of tales both reiterate and unsettle late seventeenth-century discourses of love, masculinity and femininity through conventions such as the romantic quest, the marriage closure, chivalric heroes and good and evil fairies.

• This book studies texts including early versions of Cinderella, Little Red Riding Hood and Sleeping Beauty • It shows the specific perspectives that women writers brought to the genre, and offers a new approach to sexuality and gender in fairy tales • The 114 tales discussed - of which two-thirds were by women writers - influenced many later writers of fairy tales, including the Grimms

Acknowledgments; Introduction; Part I. Marvelous Storytelling: 1. Marvelous realities: toward an understanding of the merveilleux; 2. Reading (and) the ironies of the marvelous; 3. The marvelous in context: the place of the contes de fées in late seventeenth-century France; Part II. Marvelous Desires: 4. Quests for love: visions of sexuality; 5. (De)mystifications of masculinity: fictios of transcendence; 6. Imagining femininity: binarity and beyond; Afterword; Notes, Selected bibliography; Index.