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.

- 270 pages
- English
- ePUB (mobile friendly)
- Available on iOS & Android
eBook - ePub
Love, Power, and Gender in Seventeenth-Century French Fairy Tales
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Table of contents
- Cover
- Series Page
- Title Page
- Copyright Page
- Dedication
- Contents
- List of Illustrations
- List of Tables
- Note on Sources and Translations
- Acknowledgments
- Introduction
- Part 1
- 1. The Creation of a Female Literary Community
- 2. A Shared Vocabulary of Love
- Part 2
- 3. Courtship, Consent, and Declarations of Love
- 4. Marriage, Gift-Giving, and the Obligation of Love
- 5. Love after Marriage: Moral Lessons and Unhappy Endings
- Conclusion
- Appendix 1
- Appendix 2
- Appendix 3
- Appendix 4
- Appendix 5
- Appendix 6
- Notes
- Bibliography
- Index
- About Bronwyn Reddan
- Series List
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Yes, you can access Love, Power, and Gender in Seventeenth-Century French Fairy Tales by Bronwyn Reddan in PDF and/or ePUB format, as well as other popular books in Literature & French Literary Criticism. We have over 1.5 million books available in our catalogue for you to explore.