Love, Power, and Gender in Seventeenth-Century French Fairy Tales

"Love, Power, and Gender in Seventeenth-Century French Fairy Tales is a notable addition to scholarship of the conteuses' literary tales and provides a multidimensional view of the gendered experience of love and of the trope of the happily-ever-after."—Adrion Dula, Journal of American Folklore
“In recent years scholars have ‘rediscovered’ the unique contributions made by women writers to the development of the literary fairy tale in France, and one of the most thorough and perceptive studies is Bronwyn Reddan’s Love, Power, and Gender in Seventeenth-Century French Fairy Tales. . . . Reddan’s superb work gives full voice to tales that are still important in our own day.”—Jack Zipes, professor emeritus of German and comparative literature at the University of Minnesota
“With this important book, Bronwyn Reddan invites us to take seriously the ways in which the seventeenth-century French fairy tales written by women revise the codes of love and gender of their day. Emotions have a complex history, and fairy tales reflect that history in great detail. Reddan urges us to reconsider our preconceptions about fairy tales, love, gender, marriage, and power. And more fundamentally, she allows us to see that a genre too often considered to be simplistic and trivial is in fact diverse and profound.”—Lewis C. Seifert, professor of French studies at Brown University