(Copyright © 2005 by Wayne State University Press, Detroit, MI)
Contents
Editorial Policy
Guidelines for Submissions
Preface to the Special Issue on “Reframing the Early French Fairy Tale”
Holly Tucker
ARTICLES
France’s First Fairy Tales: The Rise and Restoration Narratives of Les nuits facetieuses
du Seigneur François Straparole
Ruth B. Bottigheimer
"France's First Fairy Tales" offers evidence for a broad distribution of Straparola's tale collection in France, based on their widespread publication there between 1560 and 1615. No evidence for magic narratives as Straparola presented them exists in France that cannot be traced to print distribution. Copious evidence also links Straparola's restoration and rise tales with Europe's subsequent French fairy tale authors and the tradition of magic and fairy tale weddings, which provided the basis for Europe's bourgeoning repertoire in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.
D’Aulnoy’s Histoire d’Hypolite, comte de Duglas (1690): A Fairy-Tale Manifesto
Allison Stedman
Although tales from the first vogue of French fairy-tale publication (1690-1715) are generally studied as independent narratives, the majority of these stories were originally published in an interpolated manner—inserted into novels, letters, memoirs, and travel relations. This paper explores the motivations behind the popular, late-seventeenth-century trend of fairy-tale interpolation by examining how the movement’s founder—Marie-Catherine Le Jumel de Barneville, comtesse d’Aulnoy—may have inspired her salon contemporaries to receive, interpret, and eventually reproduce the fairy tale as the latest mondain generic innovation.
The Violence of the Lambs
Elizabeth Wanning Harries
Fairy tales are often violent. But one kind of fairy-tale violence has been overlooked: the sacrificial violence that sometimes precedes a restoration to human form. In tales like the Grimms' "Frog Prince" and d'Aulnoy's "White Cat," previously mild and gentle characters must commit a violent act—often decapitation—in order to help a beloved animal regain its human shape. These symbolic transformations may provide a clue to the representation of self, particularly the autonomous female self, in d'Aulnoy's tales. The omission of such violence in many recent versions of the tales suggests our resistance to the possibility of true transformation and its costs.
Of Monkey Girls and a Hog-Faced Gentlewoman: Marvel in Fairy Tales, Fairgrounds, and Cabinets of Curiosities
Kathryn A. Hoffmann
In sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Europe, hairy girls made medical, court, fairy tale, and fairground fame simultaneously. Tiny nut boots decorated fairy feet in a tale by d'Aulnoy as well as the shelves of an English cabinet of curiosities. Ballads borrowed the structure of the folktale and sold a pig-faced girl like a fairy-tale princess. The article looks at cross-disciplinary intersections where anomalous bodies became tellable, collectible, and commercial. It locates the marvel of monkey-girls and a hog-faced gentlewoman within the strategies of knowledge, the cultural practices of display, and the pleasures of tale-telling that marked early-modern Europe.
Reframing the Early French Fairy Tale: A Selected Bibliography
Bérénice Virginie Le Marchand
TEXTS & TRANSLATIONS
Perrault’s Preface to Griselda and Murat’s “To Modern Fairies”
Holly Tucker and Melanie Siemens
Reviews
Critical Exchanges
Contributors