French Literature Reviews - 2026
The Tale in its Own Words
Other Literary Studies
The Tale in its Own Words: The Representation of Orality in the Fairy Tale from Classicism to the Enlightenment
Edited by Anne Defrance and Jean-François Perrin
Paris, Desjonquères, 2007
Publisher's Overview:
"One must give one's speech the free flow of conversation," wrote a contemporary of Louis XIV; as a literary genre, the fairy tale emerged at a time when writing as one speaks was the rule and reading aloud was common practice.
Writing fairy tales meant imposing fictions of enchanted voices upon a novelistic culture deeply enamored of plausibility, adapting the spoken rituals of the oriental tale to polite society, while also sharing the realm of the marvelous with opera and engaging in a fruitful dialogue with the theater: thus did those then known as the Moderns invent an art of articulating the strangeness of the world and of human beings by simulating the voices of times past or distant lands.
Our own era, in which orality is in vogue and storytelling practices are experiencing a revival, invites us to examine these questions by considering the aesthetic intentions of those literary works that were the fairy tales of the 17th and 18th centuries.
Jean-François Perrin is a professor of French literature at Stendhal University – Grenoble 3, a member of the CNRS UMR Lire 5611 (Grenoble hub), and editor-in-chief of the journal Féeries. His research focuses primarily on the 18th-century fairy tale and the work of Jean-Jacques Rousseau. Anne Defrance is an associate professor of French literature at Michel de Montaigne University (Bordeaux 3), a member of UMR Lire 5611 (Grenoble hub), and on the editorial board of the journal Féeries. Her research centers essentially on the fairy tale of the 17th and 18th centuries.
The fairy tale as a literary genre gained prominence during the 17th and 18th centuries, a period characterized by the aesthetic ideals of the Moderns. This era prioritized the art of conversation and the practice of reading aloud, influencing how writers integrated the marvelous into a culture that otherwise valued novelistic plausibility. By simulating the voices of distant lands or historical eras, these authors navigated the boundaries between written literature and the spoken word.
The collection places the fairy tale within a broader cultural framework that includes the development of opera and the conventions of the theater. It considers how the genre adapted oriental tales and folk motifs to suit contemporary literary tastes, highlighting the tension between the written form and the perceived spontaneity of speech that defined the period. Readers interested in the history of French literature and the evolution of narrative techniques may find this examination of the fairy tale's formal development and its relationship to orality relevant.