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3 1 An Introduction to Fairy Tales Today, fairy tales, beloved by children and studied by adults, are a literary genre that provides models for short stories, novels, and films. In the Middle Ages princes and princesses, whose lives more often than not ended in isolation and suffering, populated long romances. Nonetheless, these medieval stories provided the framework for early modern and modern fairy tales with their princes and princesses thrust into a world of suffering and adventure, from which they emerged triumphant, magically achieving fortune and happiness by marrying royalty and being restored to a throne. These tales were joined by others in which a poor boy or girl followed the same course, also ending up married to royalty. In the modern world, the stereotypical fairy-tale heroine rises from dire poverty to privileged status when a handsome and wealthy man recognizes her goodness and virtue. In the earliest fairy tales, fairies played a major role, and to this day a fairy or a fairy figure appears, helps a suffering hero or a languishing heroine to happiness, and then leaves. Most important of all, traditional fairy tales have happy endings. The medieval romances with happy endings concluded with a wedding that united a suffering and virtuous royal bride or bridegroom with another glamorous royal; in early modern fairy tales, happy endings similarly produced a wedding, but often brought together a risen ragtag with a royal spouse. Fairyland fictions tell an altogether different kind of story. Their human and fairy characters move between the fairyland realm and the human world, two parallel universes. Well established in the Middle Ages,1 fairyland fictions continued to flourish in the early modern period.2 In fairyland fictions, fairies’ 1. Maren Clausen-Stolzenburg (1995) and Laurence Harf-Lancner (1984) each devoted an entire study to fairyland fictions. See Maren Clausen-Stolzenburg, Märchen und mittelalterliche Literaturtradition: Zur Entstehung der Kinder- und Hausmärchen (Heidelberg: C. Winter, 1995) and Laurence Harf-Lancner, Les fées au moyen âge: Morgane et Mélusine: La naissance des fées (Paris: Honoré Champion, 1984). 2. See Ruth B. Bottigheimer, Fairy Tales: A New History (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2009). 4 / Fairy Tales Framed passage back and forth between their two worlds is both safe and easy, but humans’ visits to fairyland often turn into disaster when they leave. Mme d’Aulnoy’s 1690 L’Île de la félicité (The Island of Happiness) provides an example par excellence. Its hero, the beloved companion of Princess Felicity, wished to leave her fairyland kingdom to visit his homeland, but instead he was overtaken by the earthly passage of time and died.3 The oldest fairyland fictions come from the medieval and early modern periods. Their cast of principal characters consists solely of royalty: human kings and queens, princes and princesses, and their equally royal fairy counterparts . Only in the modern post-1789 world did middle- and lower-class folk enter into fairyland fictions, crossing from one world into the other. The conventions of fairyland fictions were so strong that they provided a basis for Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream. Even though fairyland fictions have a completely different history, they are more often than not lumped together with fairy tales. The emergence of rise and restoration fairy tales in the 1550s sparked fairy tale–specific literary discussions that began to enter prefaces, dedications, addresses to readers, internal commentary, and closing remarks. In France in the mid-1690s, fairy-tale authors such as Charles Perrault and his niece Marie-Jeanne Lhéritier initiated a public discussion of fairy tales’ function, nature, and history, which Marie-Catherine d’Aulnoy and Henriette Julie de Murat expanded when they discussed fairy tales’ aesthetic qualities. The fairy tales written by Mme d’Aulnoy and her sister fairy-tale authors evoked hostile opposition from the Abbé de Villiers, whose lacerating critique of these women’s writings appears here in full.4 3. Distinctions between fairy tales and fairyland fictions have been worked out in a number of articles. See Bottigheimer (2009) as well as the following works by Ruth B. Bottigheimer: Fairy Godfather: Straparola, Venice, and the Fairy Tale Tradition (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2002), “Fairy Tales and Fables,” in History of Childhood, ed. Paula S. Fass, vol. 2. (New York: Macmillan, 2003), “The Ultimate Fairy Tale: Oral Transmission in a Literate World,” in The Companion to the Fairy Tale, ed. Hilda Davidson, Anna Chaudhri, and Derek Brewer (Cambridge: Boydell...

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