The Tale of Bluebeard in German Literature

From the Eighteenth Century to the Present

Mererid Puw Davies author

Format:Hardback

Publisher:Oxford University Press

Published:22nd Mar '01

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The Tale of Bluebeard in German Literature cover

Bluebeard', in which women are slaughtered by a monstrous husband and their bodies hidden in a horrible chamber, is the most hair-raising of tales; yet with its happy ending, it also has a utopian force. Using the idiom of literary criticism, the study considers Bluebeard texts as a seismograph of gender politics and of the process of civilization from seventeenth-century France to 1990s Germany, in a broad range of canonical and non-canonical, often forgotten texts. The study discusses Charles Perrault's French version of 1697, through Ludwig Tieck's versions of 1797 and classic versions by the Grimms and Ludwig Bechstein, to nineteenth-century romantic fiction, the savagery of High Modernism, and twentieth-century versions such as that of the Surrealist Unica Zürn. While the focus is on literature in German, this is the first full-length study published in any language of the history of Bluebeard, and it redefines the canon and our interpretations of this key tale.

The majority of her [Davies's] readings are perceptive and provocative ... her considerable expansion of the corpus of Bluebeard tales to some 70 texts and operas is commendable, especially as many of them have been forgotten for more than a century. * Times Higher Education Supplement *
One seldom encounters a work of literary cricicism that makes such compelling reading as this investigation of the Bluebeard motif in modern German literature ... it combines thorough scholarship with imaginative intepretation and intellectual sophistication ... this is an exciting book that deserves to be widely read and influential, both within and beyond German studies. * Journal of European Studies *

ISBN: 9780199242757

Dimensions: 224mm x 146mm x 21mm

Weight: 468g

296 pages