Wonder Tales: Six French Stories of Enchantment

Book Overview

Once upon a time, in the Paris of Louis XIV, five ladies and one gentleman-- all of them aristocrats-- seized on the new enthusiasm for "Mother Goose Stories" and decided to write some of them down. Telling stories resourcefully and artfully was a key social grace, and when they recorded these elegant narratives they consciously invented the modern fairy tale as we still know it today.
For this beautiful anthology of six masterpiece wonder tales,...

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0195178211
• ISBN13: 9780195178210
• Release Date: November 2004
• Publisher: Oxford University Press
• Length: 243 Pages
• Weight: 0.45 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.6" x 5.0" x 8.1"

Customer Reviews

Fairy Tales

Great little novel collection of classic fairy tales from the past. Not your typical Disney tales.

Very Enchanting Little Book

I had to buy this book just because of how lovely it is, only slightly larger than palm sized with an eye catching cover, besides fairy tales that I hadn't read...definatly worth my curiousity. Inside of the book are six Wonder Tales, from the salons of France, these are very similiar in style and even in story to many of the more well known fairy tales. Each is romantic in nature and has the presence of a fairy (Good or bad). Often with the moral of outward apperances being deceptive. The Six Stories are: The White Cat-- Marie Catherine D'Aulnoy--translated by--John Ashbery This one I had read before in a much abbreviated, more heavily illustrated kid friendly fairy tale book. Its still a very charming story, sort of a Rapunzel set up but from a different point of view. Very enjoyable. The Subtle Princess-- Marie-Jeanne l'Heritier de Villadon--translated by Gilbert Adair I loved this story, it had one of the best princesses in it, Finessa. She was one tough cookie, and showed it with her ability to use the axe that was `accidentally' forgotten in her bedroom. By far the best scene of all the stories. Bearskin-- Henriette Julie De Murat-- translated by Terence Cave There are alot of stories of princes and princesses being stuck in the fur of another animal. This one covers the before and after of our princess getting into her bear guise. Plus it has some very fun supporting characters. The Counterfit Marquise --Charles Perrault and Francois Timoleon de Choisy--Translated by Ranjit Bolt No fairies in this one. This is so oddly modern in its themes. A woman is determined to have a daughter--even if it means telling her son that he is one as he grows up. What are the odds that she falls for a man who really isn't one? Still the love between the two characters is touchingly sweet. Starlight--Henriette Julie De Murat-- Translanted by Terence Cave Has some racial themes in it towards the end, which could have been better used to tell a differently moral, but probably wasn't what the author had in mind. A prince is determined to marry a slavegirl named Starlight. His father and mother, even though at one point they promise him he can, won't let him. The Great Green Worm--Marie Catherine D'Aulnoy-- Translated by A.S. Byatt Cupid and Psyche with a little bit of an old Arthurian story twist. Story also refers to Cupid and Psyche (I love that the heroine is aware of that tale) has very cool little creatures in it, the pagods. I loved this little book and hope they will put out more (a footnote mentioned future plans). The tales were very well told and had moments of humour and human insight in them. The first book of fairy tales I have enjoyed in a while.

Six Subversive Little Stories from the Past.

When I was a child, I had a much-battered, rather chewed up copy of Andrew Lang's The Blue Fairy Book, and it remained a favorite of mine well into my teens. Unlike the bowdlerized Disney renditions, I found these tales to cause delightful shivers, and images of enchantment that stayed with me, often inspiring my own artistic endevours. Over the years I've kept reading various reworkings of the classic tales, but most of them were pale shadows of the originals, and not very good. Editor Marina Warner takes six tales from the seventeenth century, written by and for the French aristocracy, and invites other modern fabulists to translate and update these stories for today's readers. Longtime author Marina Warner provides the introduction, as well as a glossary, notes on the authors and translators, as well as the background of the stories themselves. Finally there is a selection of further works on the art of fairytales and the role that they have played in modern culture and thought. The illustrations are by Sophie Herxheimer, in a rather scrawling, thick black ink style. To be honest, I don't like the pictures very much, they're crude and rather primitive, with little to give any vision to the refined aristocratic world that created the stories. What I discovered while reading these stories that the women in them are slyly showing a form of early feminism, where they use their wits to survive in a world that expected that women remain submissive, quiet, and rather stupid creatures, fit only to bear children. I wonder if the women of these French salons were quietly creating possibilities of subversion and a world where women were valued for who they were, instead of just what was expected of them. I'm hoping that there will be more of these collections published in the future. While I didn't think much of the illustrations -- and these stories really do call out for something a bit more refined and finished rather than these crude scrawls, I hope that more authors will take the time to delve into the rich stories of the past, instead of just doing tired retreads of such standard tales as Beauty and the Beast, Sleeping Beauty and Cinderella.

Lovely roses, with thorns of discontent

_Wonder Tales_ is a small and expensive collection of French courtly fairy tales, most written by upper-class women. Their themes seem frivolous now, but the stories were actually quite subversive for their time; in them, the authors promoted female autonomy, true love, and marriage by choice rather than by arrangement. (The authors themselves often were the victims of terrible arranged marriages. In these stories they dream of a better world.)The stories are not the succinct tales we are used to; they can be byzantine and winding. Just when you think it's time for "happily ever after", in comes another twist. But the tales are for the most part both funny and romantic, and I enjoyed them.This might even be considered essential reading, if you're reading _From the Beast to the Blonde_. As I read Warner's scholarly study, I kept wishing I had access to the obscure stories she was constantly quoting. When I found this, it helped a great deal; I only wish _Wonder Tales_was sold in paperback as a companion volume to Beast/Blonde.

Pricey but aesthetically pleasing fairy tale collection

As one of the editorial reviewers comments, this book is intended for gift-giving. It is a charming, diminutive hardcover containing six French fairy tales from the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries, translated by some prestigious modern writers and translators, with an introduction, biographical notes, and bibliography by Marina Warner. These tales (and those in future volumes which Warner says she hopes to bring out) are especially interesting to read after Warner's From the Beast to the Blonde, which examines the French salon society and its members (mostly women) who used the writing of these tales as a form of social protest as well as entertainment and even escape. But three of these six tales, as well as a number of others from the same milieu, appear in translations by Jack Zipes in his inexpensive paperback "Beauty and the Beast and Other Classic French Fairy Tales." If you are interested in a broad selection of these tales, including some famous ones like "Little Red Riding Hood" and "The Sleeping Beauty" (complete with Perrault's violent episodes that are often left out in children's versions), Zipes is a good choice. The texts are there, along with some scholarly introductions and biographies of the authors of the tales in a mass-market format.Warner's book is more aesthetically pleasing. Its elegant, whimsical design and first-class literary translations invite the reader to escape into stories that are part magical fantasy and part social commentary. These tales are longer than the usual children's fairy stories, and they tend to have more elaborate adventures and quite worldly descriptions of clothing, decoration, and other amenities of aristocratic life. Most of the plots resolve themselves through the intervention of fairies, whose actions may seem unmotivated (deciding not to help a heroine on one page and then suddenly turning up to save her from being eaten by an ogre a couple pages later). I personally find this easier to take in this charming little hardcover than in the no-nonsense mass-market format of the Zipes collection.Warner's book is also significant in that, in addition to the three tales that overlap with Zipes, it contains some genuine rarities in the genre. According to Warner's introduction, two of the six Wonder Tales, "Bearskin" and "Starlite", have never been translated into English before, and Charles Perrault's tale, "The Counterfeit Marquise," has never been included in previous Perrault collections (perhaps because, having no supernatural characters, and taking cross-dressing as its theme, it would not be considered appropriate for the juvenile audience that these collections have historically targeted). Regarding the translations themselves, I compared at random some paragraphs in the stories that appear in both books. The quality of the prose is not miles apart, since both books strive for accuracy in translation. Nevertheless, if you admire