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  • Féeries: Études sur le conte merveilleux XVIIe–XIXe siécle 5, Le Rire des conteurs
  • Elizabeth Wanning Harries (bio)
Féeries: Études sur le conte merveilleux XVIIe–XIXe siécle 5, Le Rire des conteurs, ed. Jean Mainil. Université Stendhal-Grenoble 3: UMR Lire, 2008. 186pp. €19. ISSN 1766-2842. ISBN 978-2-84310-123-6.

The fifth volume (2008) of the new journal Féeries is an important contribution not only to the study of the fairy tale, but also to the theory and practice of fiction in the eighteenth century, particularly in France. Under the general title “Le Rire des conteurs,” the volume includes essays by eight versatile and knowledgeable scholars, who have looked carefully at the laughter that tales provoke from about 1690 to the publication of Charles Mayer’s Cabinet des fées in 1785–86. Their searches for the sources of this laughter illuminate the tales themselves and their intertextualities, as well as placing them in the context— perhaps even in the centre—of eighteenth-century narrative experimentation.

In his opening essay, Jean Mainil (the editor of this volume) shows the ways in which Mme d’Aulnoy plays with the fairy-tale genre itself, particularly in the framed tales produced, read, and written by the characters in her novels Le Nouveau gentilhomme bourgeois and Don Gabriel Ponce de Leon. Here he recapitulates some of the conclusions from his book Madame d’Aulnoy et le rire des fées (2001), but concentrates on the influence of Cervantes’s elaborate fictional games. Like Don Quixote, the characters sometimes attempt to relive the tales they have heard and read, but they also write them. The friction between the tales they supposedly create and their parodic context is part of Mme d’Aulnoy’s comic verve. (Mainil also summarizes and evaluates the other essays that appear in the volume.)

Several contributions explore the relationships between fairy tales and other literary forms of the period. Jean-Paul Sermain sketches [End Page 159] three situations in Perrault and three in Galland to show how they produce a “choc comique” as the daily meets the marvellous and fantastic. He touches on some of the reasons why tales often make it possible to laugh at terrible situations. Perhaps the most valuable part of his essay is his placement of these early French tales in the eighteenthcentury movement towards the mixing of genres and modes. Like many other forms, these tales move away from the strict division of comic from tragic; they make readers see “un même moment dans les deux perspectives du plaisant et du pathétique” (28).

Nathalie Rizzoni, in her essay “Féerire à la foire,” studies a group of plays from the first half of the century—many of them still in manuscript at the Bibliothèque Nationale—that stage fairy-tale material. Her account of the friction between their different modes (the comicrealistic, the supernatural and fantastic, and the theatrical with its characters from the commedia dell’arte) indirectly supports Sermain’s account of mixed genres. As she points out, the fragmentary effect is still more striking on the stage than on the page and activates the spectator much as some contemporary fiction activates the reader. (She describes some wonderful scenes that mix geographies real and imagined, or characters from different walks of fiction, or fantastic metamorphoses with comic licentiousness.) She also suggests that these plays deserve a much larger role in French theatrical history, linking as they do the tales of the late seventeenth century with nineteenth-century theatrical “féeries.”

I do not have the space to treat several essays on individual writers and works in detail: Manuel Couvreur’s “Du Sourire à la Morsure: l’humour dans la traduction des Mille et une nuits par Antoine Galland”; Françoise Gevrey’s “L’Amusement dans Grigri de Cahusac”; and Nicolas Veysman’s “Le Rictus moral de Marmontel.” But all of them show, sometimes brilliantly, the continuing emphasis on fictional games and bricolage that characterizes the fantastic fiction of the period. The only essay I found somewhat disappointing was Jan Herman’s “Les Contes hiéroglyphiques de Horace Walpole et la question...

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