Fairy Tales, Sexuality, and Gender in France, 1690-1715

Between 1690 and 1715, well over one hundred literary fairy tales appeared in France, two-thirds of them written by women. This book explores why fashionable adults were attracted to this new literary genre and considers how it became a medium for reconceiving literary and historical discourses of sexuality and gender.

Integrating socio-historical, structuralist, and post-structuralist approaches, Seifert argues that these fairy tales use the "marvelous" (or supernatural) to mediate between conflicting cultural desires, particularly between nostalgia and utopian longings.