For several years, I have taught a course on Approaches the French Fairy Tale for our Freshman Seminar program at Vanderbilt University. As many Marvels & Tales readers who teach similar classes can relate, a course on fairy tales is guaranteed raise the eyebrows of more than a few parents and administrators. However, sharing space in the schedule of classes with seminars such as York, New York: Film and Literature, Musicals! All Singing, All Dancing, Social Construction of Hip Hop/Rap Music, and Simple Art of Murder: Knowledge and Guilt in Detective Literature, my fairy-tale course is in good company (or, in the case of the latter, perhaps not!). In the context of a Freshman Seminar program, the choice of an ostensibly lightweight topic is a calculated risk that has the potential for a rich payoff. First, fairy tales and other such courses fill seats; my seminar is always over-enrolled. Second, and more important, the primary goal of our Freshman Seminar program is to instill curiosity [in students] ... [to help them] examine all ideas critically [and] develop a mind free of (http://sitemason.vanderbilt.edu/cas/freshmanseminars). What better way challenge preconceptions than ask students engage critically texts that seem, at least initially them, impermeable-and perhaps even antitheticalto scholarly discourse? While the students change each semester, the notions or critical frameworks they bring my classroom on the first day remain fairly stable: Fairy tales are, and always have been, for children. They are generally consistent across time and space. They remain untouched by the cultural politics of race, class, gender, and sexuality. And, of course, they are at their best when in the hands of Disney's Imagineers. As the fairy tale is increasingly recognized as a legitimate field for scholarly inquiry, researchers have offered up a treasure of evidence that dramatically rewrites these and other popular (mis)understandings of what is, in the end, a highly complex genre. From formalist and structuralist accounts of the fairy tale psychoanalytic perspectives, from feminist engagements sociohistorical inquiries, the trajectory of critical approaches is as diverse as the tales themselves. As fairy-tale studies as a general field continues flourish, it is worth noting that beginning in the mid-1990s there seems have been a disproportionate upsurge in interest regarding the French fairy tale and particularly those tales originating from the Old Regime salons. New editions of Perrault and d'Aulnoy's contes, moderately priced anthologies of seventeenth- and eighteenth-century tales, and English translations have made many previously unknown texts available a wider public for the first time. Moreover, the books of Lewis C. Seifert (1996), Philip E. Lewis (1996), and Patricia Hannon (1998) set a deliberate and highly scholarly tone for monographs by Anne Defrance (1998), Nadine Jasmin (2002), Elizabeth Wanning Harries (2001), Jean Mainil (2001), Sophie Raynard (2002), Holly Tucker (2003), and Anne E. Duggan (forthcoming). For readers interested in exploring the remarkable breadth and depth of scholarship on the early French fairy tale, Berenice V Le Marchand's impressive bibliography, included in this issue, will prove extremely useful. The aim of this special issue is not rehearse what these important studies already tell us about the early French fairy tale. Instead, what is at stake in these pages is-as the title suggests-a refraining of the types of questions that we may wish ask as we continue recalibrate and nuance our understandings of the contes de fees, their contexts, and the conteurs and conteuses themselves. Just as we challenge our students shake off preconceived notions in order open their minds new ways of viewing a seemingly wellworn topic, it may be time for us, too, give thought the frames through which we view our work, the questions those frames allow us ask, and how the answers we are likely uncover are dictated by the boundaries we have set for ourselves, both intentionally and unwittingly. …