The tale of Bluebeard in German literature
Subtitle: from the eighteenth century to the present
By: Mererid Puw Davies.
Series: Oxford modern languages and literature monographs
Publisher: Clarendon Press; Oxford University Press
Published: 2001
Place of publication: Oxford; New York
Language: eng
Number of pages: 279
Subjects: German literature -- History and criticism.; German literature -- 18th century -- History and criticism.; German literature -- 19th century -- History and criticism.; German literature -- 20th century -- History and criticism.; Bluebeard (Legendary character) in literature.
Description: "'Bluebeard', in which women are slaughtered by a monstrous husband and their bodies hidden in a horrible chamber, is the most hair-raising of tales; yet with its happy ending, it also has a utopian force."

"Using the idiom of literary criticism, the study considers Bluebeard texts as a seismograph of gender politics and of the process of civilization from seventeenth-century France to 1990s Germany, in a broad range of canonical and non-canonical, often forgotten texts. The study discusses Charles Perrault's French version of 1697, through Ludwig Tieck's versions of 1797 and classic versions by the Grimms and Ludwig Bechstein, to nineteenth-century romantic fiction, the savagery of High Modernism, and twentieth-century versions such as that of the Surrealist Unica Zurn."

"While the focus is on literature in German, this is the first full-length published study in English, French, or German devoted entirely to the history of Bluebeard, and it redefines the canon and our interpretations of this tale."--Jacket.
Notes: Includes bibliographical references (p. [256]-272) and index.