Une fée moderne: An Unpublished Fairy Tale by la Comtesse de Murat, an Edition
Editor Ellen Welch, University of Pennsylvania
Volume 18, no. 4, Summer 2006
©McMaster University, 2015. All articles published on the Eighteenth-Century Fiction website are protected by copyright held by Eighteenth-Century Fiction, a journal published by the Faculty of Humanities at McMaster University.
ABSTRACT
The journal of the prolific author Henriette-Julie de Castelnau, comtesse de Murat (from which this anecdote comes) well illustrates the prominent role that fairy tales played in educated French society at the turn of the eighteenth century. Despite their status as “children’s literature” today, in Murat’s time contes de fées represented a new literary genre, a site of literary experimentation, and a form for exploring such hefty subject matter as monarchical politics and sexual norms. Some of the period’s most innovative writers made their mark in the fairy tale genre. Murat herself may be counted among the most inventive, both in her choice of themes and in her formal originality. More than any other author, Murat championed the conte de fées as novel and sophisticated, famously christening her literary peers “les fées modernes.”
Other ECF articles on the topic of “tales” include:
Décors et merveilles: Les Cadres éloquents dans les collections illustrées (Clément-Pierre Marillier, Le Cabinet des fées et Les Voyages imaginaires, 1785–89
by AURELIE ZYGEL-BASSO (ECF 23.4, Summer 2011).
Humour et sociabilité dans les récits galants et les écrits mondains aux XVIIe et XVIIIe siècles en France
by DOMINIQUE HOLZLE (ECF 26.4, Summer 2014)
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