Title: Fairy tales, sexuality, and gender in France, 1690-1715
First published: 1996
Description: Between 1690 and 1715, well over one hundred literary fairy tales appeared in France, two-thirds of them written by women. This book explores why fashionable adults were attracted to this new literary genre and considers how it became a medium for reconceiving literary and historical discourses of sexuality and gender.

Integrating socio-historical, structuralist, and post-structuralist approaches, Seifert argues that these fairy tales use the "marvelous" (or supernatural) to mediate between conflicting cultural desires, particularly between nostalgia and utopian longings.
Subjects: History and criticism, French fiction, Utopias in literature, Fairy tales, Marvelous, The, in literature, Gender identity in literature, Sex in literature, Fairy tales, history and criticism, French fiction, history and criticism
Places: France
Time periods: 17th century, 18th century
LC classification: PQ637.F27 S45 1996