Oxford Modern Languages and Literature Monographs
1 total work
Bluebeard', in which women are slaughtered by a monstrous husband and their bodies hidden in a horrible chamber, is the most hair-raising of tales; yet with its happy ending, it also has a utopian force.
Using the idiom of literary criticism, the study considers Bluebeard texts as a seismograph of gender politics and of the process of civilization from seventeenth-century France to 1990s Germany, in a broad range of canonical and non-canonical, often forgotten texts. The study discusses Charles Perrault's French version of 1697, through Ludwig Tieck's versions of 1797 and classic versions by the Grimms and Ludwig Bechstein, to nineteenth-century romantic fiction, the savagery of High Modernism,
and twentieth-century versions such as that of the Surrealist Unica Zurn.
While the focus is on literature in German, this is the first full-length study published in any language of the history of Bluebeard, and it redefines the canon and our interpretations of this key tale.
Using the idiom of literary criticism, the study considers Bluebeard texts as a seismograph of gender politics and of the process of civilization from seventeenth-century France to 1990s Germany, in a broad range of canonical and non-canonical, often forgotten texts. The study discusses Charles Perrault's French version of 1697, through Ludwig Tieck's versions of 1797 and classic versions by the Grimms and Ludwig Bechstein, to nineteenth-century romantic fiction, the savagery of High Modernism,
and twentieth-century versions such as that of the Surrealist Unica Zurn.
While the focus is on literature in German, this is the first full-length study published in any language of the history of Bluebeard, and it redefines the canon and our interpretations of this key tale.