Review of "Love, Power, and Gender in Seventeenth–Century French Fairy Tales" by Bronwyn Reddan.

Bronwyn Reddan. Love, Power, and Gender in Seventeenth–Century French Fairy Tales. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2021. xvii + 242 pp. $65.00. Review by Rori Bloom, University of Florida

Miniature Marvelous: The Petit as Personal Aesthetic in the Fairy Tales of Marie-Catherine d’Aulnoy

Although many fairy tales feature small characters or things, Marie-Catherine d’Aulnoy’s evocation of the small is not just a consequence of her tales’ small scale but rather a self- conscious decision to examine and exploit the limits of the genre. Although d’Aulnoy sometimes associates the small with deformity or inferiority, most often she evokes small things to admire their delicate beauty. I argue that in her descriptions of small objects, especially toys and jewels, d’Aulnoy celebrates the skill with which they have been made in a self-reflexive move that ascribes new value to her artfully crafted tales

Modes of Play in Eighteenth-Century France

Collecting diverse critical perspectives on the topic of play—from dolls, bilboquets, and lotteries, to writing itself—this volume offers new insights into how play was used to represent and reimagine the world in eighteenth-century France. In documenting various modes of play, contributors theorize its relation to law, religion, politics, and economics. Equally important was the role of “play” in plays, and the function of theatrical performance in mirroring, and often contesting, our place in the universe. These essays remind us that the spirit of play was very much alive during the “Age of Reason,” providing ways for its practitioners to consider more “serious” themes such as free will and determinism, illusions and equivocations, or chance and inequality. Standing at the intersection of multiple intellectual avenues, this is the first comprehensive study in English devoted to the different guises of play in Enlightenment France, certain to interest curious readers across disciplinary backgrounds.https://digitalcommons.bucknell.edu/bucknell-press/1065/thumbnail.jp