Naissance du conte feminin: Mots et Merveilles: Les Contes de fees de Madame d'Aulnoy (1690-1698) (review)

Abstract

At the outset of her book on Madame d'Aulnoy, Nadine Jasmin defines the object of her study to be an analysis of the "birth of a new literary genre," that of the literary fairy tale, out of the oral tale. In order to explain the emergence and establishment of this new genre, Jasmin takes as her point of departure the fairy-tale corpus of d'Aulnoy, the most prolific fairy-tale writer of late seventeenth-century France, whose tales indeed are more representative of the larger trend than those written by her contemporary, Charles Perrault. Jasmin's study is divided into three sections, the first of which treats the ways in which d'Aulnoy combines various sources—both folkloric and literary—to create a new, autonomous literary genre. Section 2 centers on the "matter" of the tales, or their sociocultural context. In Section 3 (there is also a Section 4 Jasmin does not mention in her general introduction, but which could be considered to be part of Section 3) Jasmin looks at the "manner" of the tales, the stylistic devices and narrative strategies d'Aulnoy employs to create her tales, not to mention her original imaginary worlds.