The Mirror Broken: Women’s Autobiography and Fairy Tales

In the 1970s both Alison Lurie and her critics seemed to assume that fairy tales give us powerful, often damaging images of women which women must adopt or resist. But recent women’s autobiographies often reveal a more oblique and complex relationship to fairytale patterns and imagery. Both Christa Wolf in her Kindheitsmuster (1976) and Carolyn Steedman in her Landscape for a Good Woman (1985) find broken reflections of their experiences in the fairy tales of the Brothers Grimm and Hans Christian Andersen. They repeatedly return to fragments of well-known tales that mirror a layered, inconsistent, even unknowable self

The Violence of the Lambs

Fairy tales are often violent. But one kind of fairy-tale violence has been overlooked: the sacrificial violence that sometimes precedes a restoration to human form. In tales like the Grimms’ “Frog Prince” and d’Aulnoy’s “White Cat,” previously mild and gentle characters must commit a violent act—often decapitation—in order to help a beloved animal regain its human shape. These symbolic transformations may provide a clue to the representation of self, particularly the autonomous female self, in d’Aulnoy’s tales. The omission of such violence in many recent versions of the tales suggests our resistance to the possibility of true transformation and its costs

Des Fata aux fées

D’où vient l’histoire de La Belle au bois dormant? Qui sont les «fées» présentes lors de la naissance de la petite princesse? Ce volume rassemble des contributions qui rendent compte de l’extraordinaire richesse et complexité de cette vieille histoire que l’on croyait familière, depuis ses lointaines origines dans les cultes et rites de la naissance au Moyen-Orient. Le destin qui se joue au moment de la naissance lie la vie et la parole, et cette association inscrite dans l’étymologie du mot fée s’est manifestée dans l’art, la littérature et la culture occidentale jusqu’à aujourd’hui. Le volume propose des éclairages inédits sur la longue tradition iconographique et littéraire en lien avec La Belle au bois dormant, des reliefs sumériens aux célèbres contes de Perrault et des Grimm, jusqu’à leurs réécritures et adaptations cinématographiques contemporaines. Where does the Sleeping Beauty tale come from? Who are the «fairies» that preside over the birth of the little princess? This volume collects various essays that bear witness to the extraordinary richness and complexity of this familiar story, starting with ancient Middle-Eastern birth cults and rituals. The fate that is determined at the moment of birth, linking as it does life-span and speech, is woven into the etymology of the word fairy itself, and this connection threads through the history of the tale in Western literature, art and culture from Antiquity to the present day. The volume brings to light the long literary and iconographic tradition related to La Belle au bois dormant/Sleeping Beauty, from Sumerian bas-reliefs to Perrault’s and Grimm’s classic versions of the tale to contemporary rewritings and film adaptations

Hedgehog Theory: How to Read a Romantic Fragment Poem

The writing and publication of unfinished texts has long been a recognised feature of the British Romantic period. Recent scholarship has observed that the reading public in the late 18th century and early 19th century became accustomed to the fragment, and found it acceptable and even fashionable: the idea of an unfinished text evolved from being a failure of genre, into a quasi-genre in it own right. Poets such as Coleridge, Byron, Shelley and Keats published texts in unfinished forms, and often advertised this fact rather than apologised for it. One established critical method of reading the Romantic fragment poem is in relation to key features of German Romantic philosophy, especially the fragmentary writings of Friedrich Schlegel, who developed a theory of the artistic or philosophical fragment as a radiant moment that reached beyond its own boundaries. Modern interpretations of Romantic fragments have included formalist, deconstructionist and New Historicist approaches. This article provides a survey of the most influential overviews of the Romantic fragment, arguing for the importance of maintaining a simple common terminology that distinguishes between those fragments that were deliberately published by the author, and those that are recovered by editors. There is some analysis of examples from Coleridge, Ann Batten Cristall and Lord Byron, in which the versatility of fragment poems is explored, with an emphasis on self-reflexivity, the text providing an allegory of its own reading. The article argues that fragment poems are highly useful in the teaching of Romanticism, since they demand bold, imaginative readings that project a resolution beyond the text, and thus dramatise in miniature some key aspects of Romantic thought and aesthetics, such as thwarted idealism, and the visionary longing for the absolute