Love, Power, and Gender in Seventeenth-century French Fairy Tales

Love, Power, and Gender in Seventeenth-century French Fairy Tales

Author: Bronwyn Reddan

Publisher:

Published: 2020

Total Pages: 0

ISBN-13: 9781496223944

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Love, Power, and Gender in Seventeenth-Century French Fairy Tales questions the idealization of fairy-tale romance as the ultimate happy ending by showing how the women writers who dominated the first French fairy-tale vogue, the conteuses, used the genre to critique the power dynamics of courtship and marriage


Love, Power, and Gender in Seventeenth-Century French Fairy Tales

Love, Power, and Gender in Seventeenth-Century French Fairy Tales

Author: Bronwyn Reddan

Publisher: U of Nebraska Press

Published: 2020-12

Total Pages: 190

ISBN-13: 1496223934

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Love is a key ingredient in the stereotypical fairy-tale ending in which everyone lives happily ever after. This romantic formula continues to influence contemporary ideas about love and marriage, but it ignores the history of love as an emotion that shapes and is shaped by hierarchies of power including gender, class, education, and social status. This interdisciplinary study questions the idealization of love as the ultimate happy ending by showing how the conteuses, the women writers who dominated the first French fairy-tale vogue in the 1690s, used the fairy-tale genre to critique the power dynamics of courtship and marriage. Their tales do not sit comfortably in the fairy-tale canon as they explore the good, the bad, and the ugly effects of love and marriage on the lives of their heroines. Bronwyn Reddan argues that the conteuses' scripts for love emphasize the importance of gender in determining the "right" way to love in seventeenth-century France. Their version of fairy-tale love is historical and contingent rather than universal and timeless. This conversation about love compels revision of the happily-ever-after narrative and offers incisive commentary on the gendered scripts for the performance of love in courtship and marriage in seventeenth-century France.


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

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

Author: Lewis C. Seifert

Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Published: 1996-11-13

Total Pages: 294

ISBN-13: 052155005X

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Between 1690 and 1715, well over one hundred literary fairy tales appeared in France, two-thirds of them written by women. This 1996 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.


Fabulous Identities

Fabulous Identities

Author: Patricia Hannon

Publisher: Rodopi

Published: 1998

Total Pages: 230

ISBN-13: 9789042005228

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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.


Making the Marvelous

Making the Marvelous

Author: Rori Bloom

Publisher: U of Nebraska Press

Published: 2022-06

Total Pages: 248

ISBN-13: 1496222679

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Rori Bloom demonstrates that Marie-Catherine d’Aulnoy (1652–1705) and Henriette-Julie de Murat (1670–1716) changed the stakes of the fairy tale: instead of inviting their readers to marvel at the magic that changes rags to riches, they enjoined them to acknowledge the skill that transforms raw materials into beautifully made works of art.


The Lost Princess

The Lost Princess

Author: Anne E. Duggan

Publisher: Reaktion Books

Published: 2023-09-12

Total Pages: 271

ISBN-13: 1789148138

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Once upon a time: the forgotten female fabulists whose heroines flipped the fairy tale script. People often associate fairy tales with Disney films and with the male authors from whom Disney often drew inspiration—notably Charles Perrault, the Brothers Grimm, and Hans Christian Andersen. In these portrayals, the princess is a passive, compliant figure. By contrast, The Lost Princess shows that classic fairy tales such as “Cinderella,” “Rapunzel,” and “Beauty and the Beast” have a much richer, more complex history than Disney’s saccharine depictions. Anne E. Duggan recovers the voices of women writers such as Marie-Catherine d’Aulnoy, Marie-Jeanne L’Héritier, and Charlotte-Rose de La Force, who penned popular tales about ogre-killing, pregnant, cross-dressing, dynamic heroines who saved the day. This new history will appeal to anyone who wants to know more about the lost, plucky heroines of historic fairy tales.


Trust and Proof

Trust and Proof

Author: Andrea Rizzi

Publisher: BRILL

Published: 2017-11-06

Total Pages: 327

ISBN-13: 9004323880

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Translators’ contribution to the vitality of textual production in the Renaissance is still often vastly underestimated. Drawing on a wide variety of sources published in Spanish, Portuguese, Italian, Latin, German, English, and Zapotec, this volume brings a global perspective to the history of translators, and the printed book. Together the essays point out the extent to which particular language cultures were liable to shift, overlap, shrink, and expand during one of the most defining periods in the history of print culture. Interdisciplinary in approach, Trust and Proof investigates translators’ role in the diffusion of discourse about languages and ancient knowledge, as well as changing etiquettes of reading and writing.


Sex, Gender, and Illegitimacy in the Castilian Noble Family, 1400-1600

Sex, Gender, and Illegitimacy in the Castilian Noble Family, 1400-1600

Author: Grace E. Coolidge

Publisher: U of Nebraska Press

Published: 2022-12

Total Pages: 408

ISBN-13: 149623362X

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Sex, Gender, and Illegitimacy in the Castilian Noble Family, 1400-1600 looks at illegitimacy across the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries and analyzes its implications for gender and family structure in the Spanish nobility, a class whose actions, structure, and power had immense implications for the future of the country and empire. Grace E. Coolidge demonstrates that women and men were able to challenge traditional honor codes, repair damaged reputations, and manipulate ideals of marriage and sexuality to encompass extramarital sexuality and the nearly constant presence of illegitimate children. This flexibility and creativity in their sexual lives enabled members of the nobility to repair, strengthen, and maintain their otherwise fragile concept of dynasty and lineage, using illegitimate children and their mothers to successfully project the noble dynasty into the future--even in an age of rampant infant mortality that contributed to the frequent absence of male heirs. While benefiting the nobility as a whole, the presence of illegitimate children could also be disruptive to the inheritance process, and the entire system privileged noblemen and their aims and goals over the lives of women and children. This book enriches our understanding of the complex households and families of the Spanish nobility, challenging traditional images of a strict patriarchal system by uncovering the hidden lives that made that system function.


Recovering Women's Past

Recovering Women's Past

Author: Séverine Genieys-Kirk

Publisher: U of Nebraska Press

Published: 2023-06

Total Pages: 391

ISBN-13: 1496235258

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Feminist rewriting of history is designed not merely to reshape our collective memory and collective imaginary but also to challenge deeply ingrained paradigms about knowledge production. This feminist rewriting raises important questions for early modern scholars, especially in bringing to life the works of our foremothers and in reconsidering women’s agency. Recovering Women’s Past, edited by Séverine Genieys-Kirk, is a collection of essays that focus on how women born before the nineteenth century have claimed a place in history and how they have been represented in the collective memory from the Renaissance to the twenty-first century. Scrutinizing the legacies of such politically minded women as Catherine de’ Medici, Queen Isabella of Castile, Emilie du Châtelet, and Olympe de Gouges, the volume’s contributors reflect on how our histories of women (in philosophy, literature, history, and the visual and performative arts) have been shaped by the discourses of their representation, how these discourses have been challenged, and how they can be reassessed both within and beyond the confines of academia. Recovering Women’s Past disseminates a more accurate, vital history of women’s past to engage in more creative and artistic encounters with our intellectual foremothers by creating imaginative modes of representing new knowledge. Only in these interactions will we be able to break away from the prevailing stereotypes about women’s roles and potential and advance the future of feminism.