Le conte de fees litteraire en France de la fin du XVIIe a la fin du XVIIIe siecle (review)

Published first in 1981, Professor Robert's book sparked serious research into the French literary fairy tale of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries that has continued through the twenty-first century. Her massive and exhaustive study complemented and surpassed two fine studies, Mary-Elizabeth Storer's Un Épisode littéraire de la fin du XVIIe siècle. La mode des contes de fées (1685-1700) (1928) and Jacques Barchilon's Le conte merveilleux français de 1690 à 1790 (1975). Not only did Robert deal with the great production of the literary tales in greater depth than Storer and Barchilon, but she drew out the connections to the oral tradition of French folk tales and emphasized the importance of dealing with popular literature and cultural vogues. Without understanding the social history of the French fairy tale, we cannot have a full grasp of French society of that period, nor can we appreciate how the literary fairy tale itself established itself as a genre.

The republication of Le conte de fées littéraire en France de la fin du XVIIe à la fin du XVIIe siècle is, however, a disappointment. Aside from a new supplementary bibliography contributed by Nadine Jasmin and Claire Debru, a short preface to the second edition, and some minor modifications, the book is essentially the same, and Robert does not take into account the extraordinary scholarship which her own work generated since the beginning of the 1980s. Interestingly, some of the best studies have been accomplished by scholars more active in the United States and United Kingdom than in France. The work of Lewis Seifert, Gabrielle Verdier, Philip Lewis, Claire-Lise Malarte, Jean Mainil, Patricia Hannon, Holly Tucker, Marina Warner, and others has opened up new perspectives about the cultural significance of the French fairy tale, and Robert's second edition would have benefited from a chapter dealing with new approaches to a highly significant period of European history that we can safely say brought about the institutionalization of the genre of the literary fairy tale in the West. C'est dommage, but we still owe Robert a great debt for her pioneer work.