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The Frères Cogniard produced immensely popular vaudeville féeries in the nineteenth century and among them most popular was The White Cat (1852), which grafts two tales together by Marie-Catherine d’Aulnoy: “The White Cat” and “Belle-Belle, or the chevalier Fortuné.” The féerie foregrounds gender, class, human/thing, and species fluidity, which undermines hierarchies supported by dichotomies that in very similar ways privilege men over women, the upperclass over lowerclass, persons over things, and human animals over non-human animals. The essay traces these different forms of fluidity, examining the role of marvelous in general and metamorphosis in particular in problematizing normative structures of identity and revealing their arbitrary nature.

After a series of correspondence, and a gesture of great generosity on his part, I finally got to meet Jacques Barchilon in person. In September 2009 I happened to be [...]

Madame d'Aulnoy et le rire des fees: essai sur Za subversion feerique et le merveilleux comique sous l'Ancien Regime By Jean Mainil. Paris: Kime, 2001. 291 pp. Jean Mainil's study [...]

De la merveille a I'inquietude: Le registre du fantastique dans la fiction narrative au XVIIIe siecle. By Emmanuelle Sempere. Bordeaux, France: Presses uni-versitaires de Bordeaux, 2009. 611 pp. There are [...]