From the Editors

Although significant research on the French women fairy-tale writers of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries was carried out in the late 1990s and 2000s, there is still much work to be done. This issue of Marvels & Tales opens with two essays that focus on French women fairy-tale writers who use the genre to question early modern marriage practices and gender norms and to position themselves as legitimate authors. As the piece on E. T. A. Hoffmann makes clear through a focus on the dance of death in “A New Year’s Eve Adventure,” male writers also questioned binaries that underpinned normative forms of gender. Dichotomies such as masculine and feminine and life and death come under question in this issue, as well as the dichotomy traditionally upheld between East and West: the example of the Syrian storyteller Hanna Diyāb pushes us to interrogate foundational oppositions often taken for granted when examining the tradition of the Arabian Nights. Modernist fairytale drama marks another site where binaries break down, in this case between children’s and adult literature, and read-aloud fairy-tale translations disrupt perceived oppositions between reading and orality. Finally, the contextualized restaging of the process of transcription and translation of a Corn Maiden tale brings to the foreground the agency of Cora storytellers in an early-twentieth-century collection in German. Here too we see the breaking down of binary oppositions, this time concerning colonial power dynamics. We hope these pieces and their range as well as the reviews included in this issue contribute to expanding our discussions in fairy-tale studies.