Fabulous Identities

Women’s Fairy Tales in Seventeenth-Century France
Erscheinungsjahr 1998
ISBN: 978-90-420-0522-8
Verlag: Brill | Rodopi

Buch, Englisch, Band 151, 226 Seiten, Format (B × H): 150 mm x 220 mm, Gewicht: 390 g

Reihe: Faux Titre

Fabulous Identities revises traditional interpretations of the fairy-tale vogue which was dominated by salon women in the last decade of the French seventeenth century. This study of women's tale narratives is set into an investigation of how aristocratic identity was transformed by political and social realignments forced by royal absolutism or ambitious materialism. Women's distinctive contributions to the genre are defined by drawing upon various texts that articulated the century's moral, cultural, and aesthetic values, as well as upon contemporary critical perspectives including seventeenth-century historical and cultural studies.
Caught up in the philosophical, political and social controversy over woman's nature, seventeenth-century women writers benefited from salon culture and their access to writing through the literary genres of fairy tales and novels, to explore new identities and expand representations of subjectivity. Women's tales can be seen as a theater for staging an authorial persona at odds with their portrait as presented in male-authored didactic treatises and in the fairy tales of Charles Perrault. At a time when the pressures of social conformity weighed heavily upon them, the conteuses highlight through metamorphosis the affective dimension together with its impact on evolving notions of personal autonomy.

Autoren/Hrsg.

Hannon, Patricia

Inhaltsverzeichnis

Acknowledgments. Preface. I. Men Defining Women in Seventeenth-Century France. II. Corps cadavres: Heroes and Heroines in the Tales of Perrault. III. Corps métamorphosés: Heroes and Heorines in the Tales of Aulnoy. IV. Mirrors of Invention: Towards an Aesthetics of Women's Fairy-Tale Writing. V. The Signature: Revising Definitions. Afterword. Bibliography.