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- Title
Scripting Love in Fairy Tales by Seventeenth-century French Women Writers.
- Authors
Reddan, Bronwyn
- Abstract
More than one hundred fairy tales were written by French authors between 1690 and 1709. Women writers, the conteuses, produced more than two-thirds of this corpus, and their tales articulated a series of emotion scripts that reflect on the effects of love on the lives of women in seventeenth-century France. This paper examines the vocabulary of emotion in the conteuses' scripts for love as evidence of the formation of an emotional community in the sense defined by Barbara Rosenwein. The conteuses' conversations about love drew on semantic innovation in seventeenth-century French emotions discourse to represent love as a tender, turbulent passion and a social negotiation of gender politics. Their emotion scripts suggest that love is not a natural or instinctive phenomenon but a gendered, cultural code with a history reflecting the values and beliefs of the society in which it is felt.
- Subjects
FRENCH fairy tales; ROMANCE fiction writing; FRENCH romance fiction
- Publication
French History & Civilization, 2017, Vol 7, p93
- ISSN
1832-9683
- Publication type
Article