EMERGENCE OF THE FAIRY-TALE GENRE IN EUROPE WITH SOME CROSS-CULTURAL CURRENTS Cristina Bacchilega

Folktales and Fairy Tales The two are inextricably connected. Versions of most well-known fairy tales were circulating orally and continue to circulate across media. The collection of folktales from storytellers and the publication of fairy tales in print are related processes, but are not one and the same. The fairy tale in print is a modern genre mediated by European authors who adapted and appropriated the tales for class- and gender- specific readers and in support of context-specific ideologies.

Tales that are fairy-tale like are found in Ovid’s Metamorphoses, Apuleius’s The Golden Ass, and other Latin texts; also in medieval texts including Marie de France’s Lais, but they are not ‘recognized’ as belonging to a specific genre. Giovan Francesco STRAPAROLA Le piacevoli notti [The Pleasant Nights] , Venice, Italy (it included several tales we now call “fairy tales,” among them “The Pig King”)

Giambattista BASILE Lo cunto de li cunti [The Tale of Tales; The Pentamerone] , Naples, Italy

Straparola and Basile ’ s collections both include tales from the Arabian Nights, though there was not a translation in a European language of AN at that point. Basile’s book was also circulated in France.

At the court of Louis XIV of France fairy tales & myths become fashionable (La Fontaine published a version of Cupid and Psyche in Paris, 1699; There are ballets at court on this theme.)

Marie-Catherine D’AULNOY 1650 c Charles PERRAULT The Island of Happiness in novel Histoire d ’ Hypolite 1690 *term: conte de f ées (4 volumes) Les contes de f ées [Fairy Tales] , Paris, France First translation into English in 1699 Histoires ou contes du temps passé [stories or tales of past times] or Contes de ma M ère l ’ Oye [Mother Goose Tales] 1697, Paris, France 8 prose texts but also some tales in verse First translation into English: Robert Samber, 1729 La Querelle des Anciens et des Modernes Fairy-Tale Writers are on the Modern Side

Salons in Late 17th-C & Early 18th-C France

Other French writers of contes de fées: Catherine BERNARD, Marie-Jeanne LHÉRITIER, Henriette Julie de MURAT Antoine GALLAND First text of the Arabian Nights in a European language, French Le Cabinet des Fées Cheap editions of tales published in Amsterdam (3 vols, 1731à 41 vols. 1785) Gabrielle-Suzanne DE VILLENEUVE Marie LEPRINCE DE BEAUMONT La Belle et La Bête [Beauty and the Beast] La Belle et La Bête in Magazin des Enfants First translated into English as the Young Misses Magazine 1761

Jacob and Wilhelm GRIMM Kinder-und Hausmärchen (KHM) & more editions up to 1857

The Grimms inspire the collection of folktales in Europe (also in colonies): Alexander Afanas’ev, Giuseppe Pitrè, Andrew Lang, & many more… The 1819 edition of their collection is first translated/adapted into English by Edward Taylor as German Popular Tales 1823 with illustrations by George Cruikshank The Scholarly and the Popular Legacies of the Brothers Grimms

  KHM becomes children’s literature and especially after WWII Starting in the 19th century