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L'Enchanteur by Charlotte-Rose Caumont de La Force (1654-1724) stands out against other French fairy tales written at the end of the 17th century both because of its treatment of eroticism, and because of its inspiration having been identified as "a gothic book Perceval" by the author herself. The aim of this paper is to provide a comparative analysis of L'Enchanteur and its medieval source in the context of women's writing in 17th-century France. By adapting the tale of Carados that appears in the first continuation to Chrétien de Troyes's Perceval, La Force makes use of the attractive archaic language and setting, while at the same providing a streamlined, woman-centred retelling, in which Carados's mother and lover both seek (and find) love and pleasure. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The story of King Herla (ATU 470) is characterized by three major narrative sequences: the journey to the beyond; the opposition between the subjective perception of time and its objective reality; and, finally, the violation of the prohibition with the return of the hero. This tale underwent multiple reappropriations in France and Great Britain, particularly in Wales, from the Middle Ages to the present. Reinvested by literary or folklore movements, the tale allows for a nationalist and political reading that is all the more resilient given its formal plasticity and its dreamlike richness, which guaranteed its wide European dissemination and a remarkable resistance to the test of time. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Charles Perrault's "Bluebeard" is a culturally powerful tale that has reinforced and restated certain patriarchal values and norms ever since its late seventeenth-century publication in France. The wide appeal of this story led to its translation into Hawaiian in 1862, when a version of "Bluebeard" appeared in the Hawaiian-language newspaper Ka Nupepa Kuokoa. This article examines how perceptions and understandings of the values and norms embedded in the story change once "Bluebeard" is taken out of its own cultural context and introduced to a non-Western culture via the process of translation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

At the end of the 17th century, Charles Perrault wrote what would remain his most famous book, and one of the biggest successes of French literature: the Histoires et Contes du temps passé. It is commonly thought that Perrault took the matter of his book directly from traditional folklore, in order to preserve its tales. However, studies show that even if he was inspired by folktales, he was not interested in their conservation. But the popularity of Perrault's fairy tales has been so extensive that they finally returned to folklore, became an important part of it and finally helped to preserve it. This process can be explained by successive causes, which all together made it possible. From the very beginning, Perrault's fairy tales were modified to fit cheap publications. When it became a fashion to study folklore, his tales were analysed from a wrong angle. And when more serious studies were made, it was too late: one could no longer tell which tales were original folktales, and which were Perrault's modified versions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A reprint of the article "Postulated Routes from Naples to Paris: The Printer Antonio Bulifon and Giambattista Basile's Fairy Tales in Seventeenth-Century France," by Suzanne Magnanini, which appeared in the 2007 issue of "Marvels & Tales: Journal of Fairy-Tale Studies." It follows Antonio Bulifon, a French-born publisher active in Naples, Italy, on a trail from Paris to Naples and back to Paris. It presents 3 charts of many potential routes by which Bulifon's 1,674 edition of Basile's tales could have traveled to France.

A reprint of the article "On the Literary Origins of Folkloric Fairy Tales: A Comparison Between Madame d'Aulnoy's Finette Cendron and Frank Bourisaw's Belle Finette," by Charlotte Trinquet, which appeared in the 2007 issue of the journal "Marvels & Tales: Journal of Fairy-Tale Studies" is presented. It focuses on the journey of a single fairy tale which originate from Parisian salons and heard from a French Missourian miner in 1934.

The article discusses the sense and sensibility in fantasy literature through examining the role of sensibilité in French fairy tales in the last decade of the 17th century and first decade in the 18th century. The author focused on the work of the modern Queen Mab, a legendary fairy, by writer Marie-Catherine d'Aulnoy. The author showed that fairy tales play a critical role in the development of the idea of sensibilité in France and the relationship between passion and virtue.

Drawing, in particular, on three memoirs written by French veterans of the Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars, this article demonstrates how authors integrated fairytale motifs into their autobiographies. Their example raises questions about the role of storytelling among migrant male work-communities. Fairytales were more than compensatory fantasies for soldiers and sailors: they provided schemas by which they could understand novel experiences in strange surroundings and, through identification with the hero, they became inspirations to action. Storytelling permitted soldiers and sailors to present themselves to their peers from behind the mask of fiction, and to broach subjects too dangerous to be discussed openly, such as desertion. The dialectic between self-assertion in the tales (even if fashioned from the collective, ubiquitous matter of oral culture) and the communal expectations of the audience, helps historians understand the limits placed on the expression of individuality in traditional societies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]