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Madame d''Aulnoy et le rire des fees: essai sur Za subversion feerique et le merveilleux comique sous l''Ancien Regime. (Reviews).(Book Review)-

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Madame d'Aulnoy et le rire des fees: essai sur Za subversion feerique et le merveilleux comique sous l'Ancien Regime By Jean Mainil. Paris: Kime, 2001. 291 pp.

Jean Mainil's study of Madame d'Aulnoy's fairy tales is the first to seriously consider the relation between the frame narratives, often ignored by scholars, and their relation to the inscribed tales. Such considerations lead him to qualify d'Aulnoy's style as "a seditious ironic fairy writing" (30; all translations mine) with respect to both the ideological content of the tales and the genre itself. For Mainil, irony plays itself out in d'Aulnoy's corpus both intratextually, that is, in the tale's relation to the frame narrative in which it is enunciated; and intertextually, in the specific tale's relation to source texts that it parodies or rewrites. Accounting for the function of frame narratives also brings Mainil to examine the responses to the tales by inscribed readers, another source of irony in d'Aulnoy's tale collections. Overall, Mainil emphasizes the complexity and ambiguity of d'Aulnoy's tales in such a way as to problematize any judicious interpretation of them.

In his introductory chapter, Mainil questions the thesis of Raymonde Robert, who maintains the existence of a clear split between the first fairytale vogue of the 1690s, which she characterizes...