The Teller's Tale

Description

This book offers new, often unexpected, but always intriguing portraits of the writers of classic fairy tales. For years these authors, who wrote from the sixteenth to the nineteenth centuries, have been either little known or known through skewed, frequently sentimentalized biographical information. Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm were cast as exemplars of national virtues; Hans Christian Andersen's life became—with his participation—a fairy tale in itself. Jeanne-Marie Leprince de Beaumont, the prim governess who wrote moral tales for girls, had a more colorful past than her readers would have imagined, and few people knew that nineteen-year-old Marie-Catherine d'Aulnoy conspired to kill her much-older husband. Important figures about whom little is known, such as Giovan Francesco Straparola and Giambattista Basile, are rendered more completely than ever before. Uncovering what was obscured for years and with newly discovered evidence, contributors to this fascinating and much-needed volume provide a historical context for Europe's fairy tales.
Introduction
Sophie Raynard

Part I. Emergence

Straparola: Sixteenth-Century Italy
Basile: Seventeenth-Century Italy

Europe’s First Fairy Tales
Ruth B. Bottigheimer

Giovan Francesco Straparola: 1485?–1556?
Ruth B. Bottigheimer

Giambattista Basile: 1575?–1632
Nancy Canepa

Part II. Elaboration

Perrault and the Conteuses Précieuses: Seventeenth-Century France

Sophistication and Modernization of the Fairy Tale: 1690–1709
Nadine Jasmin (translated and adapted by Sophie Raynard)

Charles Perrault: 1628–1703
Yvette Saupé and Jean-Pierre Collinet (translated and adapted by Sophie Raynard)

Marie-Catherine Le Jumel de Barneville, Baroness d’Aulnoy: 1650/51?–1705
Nadine Jasmin (translated and adapted by Sophie Raynard)

Catherine Bernard: 1663?–1712
Lewis C. Seifert

Marie-Jeanne Lhéritier de Villandon: 1664–1734
Lewis C. Seifert

Henriette-Julie de Castelnau, Countess de Murat: 1668–1716
Geneviève Patard (translated and adapted by Sophie Raynard)

Charlotte-Rose de Caumont de La Force: 1650?–1724
Lewis C. Seifert

Part III. Exoticism

Galland: Eighteenth-Century France

Antoine Galland: 1646–1715
Manuel Couvreur (translated and adapted by Sophie Raynard)

Part IV. Didacticism

Jeanne-Marie Leprince de Beaumont: Eighteenth-Century France

Jeanne-Marie Leprince (or Le Prince) de Beaumont: 1711–1780?
Elisa Biancardi (translated and adapted by Sophie Raynard)

Part V. Traditionalization

Naubert: Late Eighteenth-Century and Early Nineteenth-Century Germany
The Grimms: Nineteenth-Century Germany
Bechstein: Nineteenth-Century Germany

The Legacy of Eighteenth-Century and Nineteenth-Century German Female Storytellers
Shawn C. Jarvis

Benedikte Naubert
Shawn C. Jarvis

Jacob Grimm: 1785–1863, Wilhelm Grimm: 1786-1859
Donald R. Hettinga

Ludwig Bechstein
Ruth B. Bottigheimer

Part VI. Sentimentalization

Andersen: Nineteenth Century Denmark

Hans Christian Andersen
Peer E. Soerensen

Lister of Contributors
Index

Sujets

• Europe

Informations

• Publié par: State University of New York Press
• Date de parution: 25 octobre 2012
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781438443560
• Langue: English

Extrait

The Teller's Tale
Lives of the Classic Fairy Tale Writers
Edited by
Sophie Raynard

Published by State University of New York Press, Albany
© 2012 State University of New York
All rights reserved
Printed in the United States of America
No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission. No part of this book may be stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means including electronic, electrostatic, magnetic tape, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise without the prior permission in writing of the publisher.
For information, contact State University of New York Press, Albany, NY www.sunypress.edu
Production by Eileen Nizer Marketing by Anne M. Valentine
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
The teller's tale : lives of the classic fairy tale writers / [edited by] Sophie Raynard.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978-1-4384-4355-3 (hardcover : alk. paper)
1. Fairy tales—History and criticism. 2. Authors—Biography. 3. Children's literature, European—History and criticism. 4. Fairy tales—Authorship.
I. Raynard, Sophie.
PN3437.T43 2012
398.2'09—dc23
[B]
2011048282
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
Introduction
Sophie Raynard
This book project was born from a strongly felt need to revise standard biographies of classic fairy-tale authors and editors and to present them together in a single volume. Documentary evidence, sometimes newly discovered, sometimes newly recovered from nineteenth-century suppressions, here reconfigures long-familiar images. In the case of Henriette-Julie de Castelnau, Countess de Murat, the sixteen-year-old ingénue dressed in Breton folk costume who charmed members of Louis XIV's court dissolves in the face of police evidence of a tumultuous private life, punctuated by detentions because of scandalous lesbian liaisons and physical violence. Marie-Catherine Le Jumel de Barneville, Baroness d'Aulnoy, was a fifteen year old married off to an old débauché, whom she, by the age of nineteen, tried vainly to have executed with the help of her mother and her mother's lover. And Jeanne-Marie Leprince de Beaumont, a prim and highly moral governess and author of improving books for girls, had a colorful past that included marital ambiguities. These women were all influential authors of fairy tales in the same long European tradition that included Charles Perrault, Antoine Galland, Benedikte Naubert, the Grimm brothers, and Hans Christian Andersen.
The biographies of other classic tellers of fairy tales have been unevenly available. Giovan Francesco Straparola's life was largely undocumented; Giambattista Basile's was little publicized. Others were well documented but skewed in their presentation. Perrault, for example, so often presented as a courtier, took little part in court society even though he had an office in the Versailles palace for some years. The Grimms' social lives were only examined with reference to their collection's origins in the 1980s, while Andersen's life remained until recently sentimentalized by an adoring public into a fairy tale that Andersen himself fostered.
Although scores of nineteenth-, twentieth-, and twenty-first-century editions and translations of Perrault's tales can be found today, those of his contemporaries d'Aulnoy, Bernard, Lhéritier, Murat, and de La Force, whose much larger oeuvre outshone Perrault's in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, largely dropped from view in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Consequently, earlier researchers had to resort to rare and original editions from research libraries or private collections. Moreover, reconstituting those female authors' oeuvre required, until recently, consolidating scattered tales from the novels in which many of them had been embedded. In the case of d'Aulnoy's Contes , Nadine Jasmin's 2004 edition marks the first time in more than two hundred years that volume 3 of her Contes has been printed. Similarly, the public has also rediscovered de Murat's fairy tales with Geneviève Patard's 2005 edition, while Lhéritier's original fairy-tale collection Œuvres meslées became newly available in Raymonde Robert's 2005 Champion edition, which also incorporated those of de La Force, Durand, and d'Auneuil. As scholars revisit and reedit classic authors' oeuvre, they have also reconstituted authors' lives and have contextualized their works.
Similarly partial or skewed biographies grew up around the figures who preceded the French storytellers. Only a few documents can be directly linked to Giovan Francesco Straparola, but richly layered studies of Renaissance writers' livelihoods, the worlds of print and publishing, and of daily life in Northern Italy in general and in Caravaggio and Venice in particular, have—taken together with evidence from his early and late writings—provided a basis for reconstructing his life. Giambattista Basile left more tracks in his world, and from them Nancy Canepa, who has newly translated Basile's Pentamerone into English, has created a coherent biography.
As for the storytellers who followed the French authors of the late seventeenth-century fairy-tale vogue, their biographies also appear here in newly revised form. In the case of Jeanne-Marie Leprince de Beaumont, historical detective work has fleshed out a past that de Beaumont had carefully obscured. In the case of the Grimms, the powerful historical current of nationalism long shaped Jacob and Wilhelm Grimms' biographies into exemplars of national virtues that in essential respects misleadingly embellished the lives they actually lived. Much the same thing happened with the biography of Hans Christian Andersen, whose life story was reconfigured and romanticized, while in contrast it is safe to say that few people know Ludwig Bechstein's name, and even fewer have an idea of his biography, despite the fact that his tales far outsold the Grimms' tales from the time they first appeared until the end of the nineteenth century. In short, this collection of newly researched biographies of the best-known authors of European fairy tales rectifies false data, adds new information, and provides a reliable historical context for Europe's fairy tales.
A word about the authors' names: In French we would commonly refer to women authors of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries by their title: Mademoiselle Bernard, Mademoiselle Lhéritier, Madame de Murat, Mademoiselle de La Force, and Madame d'Aulnoy, but to men authors simply by their last name: Perrault, Galland. English usage since the 1980s requires similar forms of identification for men and women writers, and we will follow that pattern in this book. It has become customary in English to refer to Madame d'Aulnoy as d'Aulnoy even though this is not acceptable in French, but because it is common practice among English-speaking scholars we will do the same here.
I

Emergence
Straparola
Sixteenth-Century Italy
Basile
Seventeenth-Century Italy
Europe's First Fairy Tales
Ruth B. Bottigheimer
Before Giovan Francesco Straparola published the two volumes of Le Piacevoli Notti ( Pleasant Nights , sometimes translated as Facetious Nights ) in 1551 and 1553, there was no evidence of fairy tales as we know them in the modern world. That is not to say that tales with magic did not exist. In fact, they did so in large numbers as components of epic cycles such as Lodovico Ariosto's and Matteo Maria Boiardo's Orlando romances or those in Amadis de Gaul , to name only a few, along with much else that is familiar from modern fairy tales, such as quests, royalty, supernatural helpers, and wicked opponents. As in many medieval romances, the princes and princesses in these romances endured innumerable sufferings and adventures in lengthy narratives. Like later European fairy tales, their core narratives were not fixed, but could be—and often were—augmented by additional episodes that were inserted or appended.
In the later fifteenth century, romances suitable for public performance were composed, printed, performed, and sold. One such was Lionbruno , one of whose earliest editions was printed in Venice in 1470. 1 Popular print was a flourishing enterprise, as is evident from the rich holdings of fifteenth- and sixteenth-century publications in libraries in every western European country. Among those ancient booklets, however, there is nowhere any evidence of the brief narrative form now known as “fairy tales.”
Europe's first fairy tales appeared among the seventy-some tales of Straparola's Pleasant Nights . Some followed a pattern that had been established in restoration plots since the writings of the ancient Greeks. Also popular in the Middle Ages, restoration stories had a prince or princess who was ousted from home and who suffered tasks and trials until restored to royal station.
Straparola regularized and abbreviated restoration tales into a recognizable fairy-tale paradigm. Different from the endless romances still being produced in the early sixteenth century, his restoration fairy tales were brief enough to be read from beginning to end at a single sitting. In terms of plot, Straparola's restoration fairy-tale heroes and heroines suffered, as did those in previous romances, but they were restored to their royal positions, specifically, by means of magic together with marriage. It is perhaps a reflection of their narrative ancestry that Straparola