Women Writing Wonder: An Anthology of Subversive Nineteenth-Century British, French, and German Fairy Tales

Women Writing Wonder: An Anthology of Subversive Nineteenth-Century British, French, and German Fairy Tales is a translation and critical edition that fills a current gap in fairy-tale scholarship by making accessible texts written by nineteenth-century British, French, and German women authors who used the genre of the fairy tale to address issues such as class, race, and female agency. These shared themes crossed national borders are due to both communication among these writers and changes in nineteenth-century European societies that similarly affected women in Western Europe. In effect, the combined texts reveal a common, transnational tradition of fairy tales by women writers who grapple with gender, sexual, social, and racial issues in a post-French Revolution Europe. The anthology provides insight into the ways the fairy tale served as a vehicle for women writers-often marginalized and excluded from more official or public genres-to engage in very serious debates.

Women Writing Wonder, divided into three parts by country, features tales that depict relationships that cross class and racial divides, thus challenging normative marriage practices; critically examine traditional fairy-tale tropes, such as "happily ever after" and the need for a woman to marry; challenge the perception that fairy-tale collecting, editing, and creation was male work, associated particularly with the Grimms; and demonstrate the role of women in the development of the emerging field of children's literature and moral tales. Through their tales, these women question, among other issues, the genre of the fairy tale itself, playing with the conventional fairy-tale narrative to compose their proto-feminist tales.

By bringing these tales together, editors and translators Julie L. J. Koehler, Shandi Lynne Wagner, Anne E. Duggan, and Adrion Dula hope both to foreground women writers' important contributions to the genre and to challenge common assumptions about what a fairy tale is for scholars, students, and general readers.

Author: Julie L. J. Koehler
Publisher: Wayne State University Press
Published: 10/05/2021
Pages: 384
Binding Type: Paperback
Weight: 1.24lbs
Size: 9.00h x 6.00w x 0.86d
ISBN: 9780814345016


Review Citation(s):
Choice 07/01/2022

About the Author

Julie L. J. Koehler is the coordinator of the Basic German Language Sequence and a lecturer of German at Wayne State University in Detroit. Her most recent publications include The Persecuted History of Cinderella: A Case for Oral Tradition in Western Europe in Gramarye and When the Inexhaustible Purse Runs Dry: Bettina von Arnim's 'Tale of the Lucky Purse' in Marvels & Tales. She is currently working on book project on Kind and Unkind Girls tales written by German women in the nineteenth century.

Shandi Lynne Wagner is assistant professor of English literature at Saint Mary-of-the-Woods College. She is author of Seeds of Subversion in Mary de Morgan's 'The Seeds of Love' in Marvels & Tales. She is currently working on a book project that analyzes nineteenth-century British women writers' use of fairy-tale and folklore motifs in protofeminist literature.

Anne E. Duggan is professor of French at Wayne State University and coeditor of Marvels & Tales: Journal of Fairy-Tale Studies. Author of Salonnières, Furies, and Fairies: The Politics of Gender and Cultural Change in Absolutist France and Queer Enchantments: The Fairy-Tale Cinema of Jacques Demy (Wayne State University Press, 2013), she is also general editor of the six-volume series, A Cultural History of Fairy Tales.

Adrion Dula teaches courses in French and fairy tales at Wayne State University. Her article B(e)aring the Beast: Deformity, Animality, and the Ableist Gaze in French Literary Variants of 'Beauty and the Beast' recently appeared in Marvels & Tales. She is currently translating a collection of fairy tales by the little-known nineteenth-century French writer Julie Delafaye-Bréhier.