The beautiful Marquise de Banneville meets a handsome marquis, and they fall in love. But the young woman is actually a young man (brought up as a girl and completely in the dark about her--or his--true sex), while the marquis is actually a young woman who likes to cross-dress. Will they live happily ever after? In the introduction, Joan DeJean presents the fascinating puzzle of authorship of this lighthearted gender-bending tale written in the late seventeenth century in France. Was it François-Timoléon de Choisy, an abbot who was happiest in drag? Marie-Jeanne L'Héritier, an outspoken defender of women's writing of her day? Or Charles Perrault, L'Héritier's uncle and the famous author of such fairy tales as "Sleeping Beauty"? DeJean argues that the tale was a collaboration of all three and discusses the permeable borderline between masculinity and femininity, transvestism, and tolerance--then and now.
2012 CHOICE Outstanding Academic Title Most early fairy tale authors had a lot to say about what they wrote. Charles Perrault explained his sources and recounted friends' reactions. His niece Marie-Jeanne Lhéritier and her friend Marie-Catherine d'Aulnoy used dedications and commentaries to situate their tales socially and culturally, while the raffish Henriette Julie de Murat accused them all of taking their plots from the Italian writer Giovan Francesco Straparola and admitted to borrowing from the Italians herself. These reflections shed a bright light on both the tales and on their composition, but in every case, they were removed soon after their first publication. Remaining largely unknown, their absence created empty space that later readers filled with their own views about the conditions of production and reception of the tales. What their authors had to say about "Puss in Boots," "Cinderella," "Sleeping Beauty," and "Rapunzel," among many other fairy tales, is collected here for the first time, newly translated and accompanied by rich annotations. Also included are revealing commentaries from the authors' literary contemporaries. As a whole, these forewords, afterwords, and critical words directly address issues that inform the contemporary study of European fairy tales, including traditional folkloristic concerns about fairy tale origins and performance, as well as questions of literary aesthetics and historical context.
Since its emergence in the seventeenth century as a distinctive cultural system, children's literature has had a culturally inferior status resulting from its existence in a netherworld between the literary system and the educational system. In addition to its official readership—children—it has to be approved of by adults. Writers for children, explains Zohar Shavit, are constrained to respond to these multiple systems of often mutually contradictory demands. Most writers do not try to bypass these constraints, but accept them as a framework for their work. In the most extreme cases an author may ignore one segment of the readership. If the adult reader is ignored, the writer risks rejection, as is the case of popular literature. If the writer utilizes the child as a pseudo addressee in order to appeal to an adult audience, the result can be what Shavit terms an ambivalent work. Shavit analyzes the conventions and the moral aims that have structured children's literature, from the fairy tales collected and reworked by Charles Perrault and the Brothers Grimm—in particular, “Little Red Riding Hood”—through the complex manipulations of Lewis Carroll in Alice's Adventures in Wonderland, to the subversion of the genre's canonical requirements in the chapbooks of the eighteenth century, and in the formulaic Nancy Drew books of the twentieth century. Throughout her study Shavit, explores not only how society has shaped children's literature, but also how society has been reflected in the literary works it produces for its children.
Scholars from many different academic areas will use this volume to explore and implement new aspects of the field of fairy-tale studies in their teaching and research.
In any society, the perception of femininity and masculinity is not necessarily dependent on female or male genitalia. Cross dressing, gender impersonation, and long-term masquerades of the opposite sex are commonplace throughout history. In contemporary American culture, the behavior occurs most often among male heterosexuals and homosexuals, sometimes for erotic pleasure, sometimes not. In the past, however, cross dressing was for the most part practiced more often by women than men. Although males often burlesqued women and gave comic impersonations of them, they rarely attempted a change of public gender until the twentieth century. This phenomenon, according to Vern L. Bullough and Bonnie Bullough, has implications for any understanding of the changing relationships between the sexes in the twentieth century. In most Western societies, being a man and demonstrating masculinity is more highly prized than being a woman and displaying femininity. Some non-Western societies, however, are more tolerant and even encourage men to behave like women and women to act like men. Cross Dressing, Sex, and Gender not only surveys cross dressing and gender impersonation throughout history and in a variety of cultures but also examines the medical, biological, psychological, and sociological findings that have been presented in the modern scientific literature. This volume offers the results of the authors' research into contemporary gender issues and the search for explanations. After examining the various current theories regarding cross dressing and gender impersonation, the Bulloughs offer their own theory. This book, widely deemed a classic in its field, is the culmination of thirty years of research by the Bulloughs into gender impersonation and cross dressing. Their groundbreaking findings will be of interest to anyone involved in the debate over nature versus nurture, and have implications not only for scholars in the various social sciences and sex and gender studies, but for educators, nurses, physicians, feminists, gays, lesbians, and general readers. This work will be of more personal interest to anyone who identifies as a transvestite or transsexual or who has been classified by medical and psychiatric professionals as suffering from gender dysphoria. Cross Dressing, Sex, and Gender covers a wide range of cultures and periods. As the first comprehensive attempt to examine the phenomenon of cross dressing, it will be of interest to students and scholars of social history, sociology, nursing, and women's studies.
As the end of the 20th century approaches, many predict that it will mirror the 19th-century decline into decadence. The author of this text finds a closer analogy with the culture wars of France in the 1690s - the time of a battle of the books known as the Quarrel between the Ancients and Moderns.
Beginning with the bold claim, "There can be no culture without the transvestite," Marjorie Garber explores the nature and significance of cross-dressing and of the West's recurring fascination with it. Rich in anecdote and insight, Vested Interests offers a provocative and entertaining view of our ongoing obsession with dressing up--and with the power of clothes.
Winner of the Christian Gauss Award for excellence in literary scholarship from the Phi Beta Kappa Society Having excavated the world's earliest novels in his previous book, literary historian Steven Moore explores in this sequel the remarkable flowering of the novel between the years 1600 and 1800-from Don Quixote to America's first big novel, an homage to Cervantes entitled Modern Chivalry. This is the period of such classic novels as Tom Jones, Candide, and Dangerous Liaisons, but beyond the dozen or so recognized classics there are hundreds of other interesting novels that appeared then, known only to specialists: Spanish picaresques, French heroic romances, massive Chinese novels, Japanese graphic novels, eccentric English novels, and the earliest American novels. These minor novels are not only interesting in their own right, but also provide the context needed to appreciate why the major novels were major breakthroughs. The novel experienced an explosive growth spurt during these centuries as novelists experimented with different forms and genres: epistolary novels, romances, Gothic thrillers, novels in verse, parodies, science fiction, episodic road trips, and family sagas, along with quirky, unclassifiable experiments in fiction that resemble contemporary, avant-garde works. As in his previous volume, Moore privileges the innovators and outriders, those who kept the novel novel. In the most comprehensive history of this period ever written, Moore examines over 400 novels from around the world in a lively style that is as entertaining as it is informative. Though written for a general audience, The Novel, An Alternative History also provides the scholarly apparatus required by the serious student of the period. This sequel, like its predecessor, is a “zestfully encyclopedic, avidly opinionated, and dazzlingly fresh history of the most 'elastic' of literary forms” (Booklist).
