The Story Of The Marquise Marquis De Banneville

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.

This remarkable document in the history of transvestism provides a first-hand account of manners and morals in late seventeenth century French society. In a light, intimate style praised by Sainte-Beuve, Choisy recounts his scandalous and entertainin

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.

Pedagogical models and methodologies for engaging with fairy tales in the classroom.