macdonnell annie (1 resultados)

Hardcover. Condición: Very good. New Edition, with Additional Illustrations. Hardcover. A brilliant and beautiful princess finds herself cursed into the form of a white cat, but not defeated.a daughter cross-dresses to save her elderly father from conscription and ends up rescuing her King not only from an invading empire but from his own wicked sister.Cinderella gets clever once her fairy godmother tires of the kindness she's always showing her cruel older sisters.a princess cursed with ugliness by an uninvited fairy at her christening falls in love with a huge and horrifying serpent and must journey to Hell and back to free him. All these and more you'll find in this late 19th century collection of French fairy tales, or "contes de fée," as their authoress, Marie-Catherine Le Jumel de Barneville, Baroness d'Aulnoy (c.16501705), coined the term (along with the idea of Prince Charming) in her influential and infamous literary salons during the decadent and dangerous court of King Louis XIV, where the eventually fame-eclipsing Charles Perrault was her guest. As fanciful and bloody as the fairy tales she penned, the events of d'Aulnoy's real life may be even more unbelievable. Given in marriage by her father at the age of 15 to the middle-aged, libertine Baron d'Aulnoy, just 4 years later, Madame d'Aulnoy would collude with her mother and two of her own alleged lovers to frame her dissolute husband with high treason, namely criticizing the King's taxes, an execution-worthy offense that kept the Baron imprisoned for 3 years in the Bastille while he labored to influence the court, ending in the execution of d'Aulnoy's accomplices, her mother's exile to England, and her own narrow escape with her newborn daughter through a window. And that's but the first act (and nary the last illicit plot) of this infamous and illustrious conteuse's life! As scholar Jack Zipes writes in his introduction to his 2021 book The Island of Happiness: Tales of Madame d'Aulnoy, "Given these dark times, and the censorship that prohibited writers from criticizing Louis XIV directly, the fairy tale became a means to vent criticism and at the same time to project hope for a better world.What interested [d'Aulnoy] most of all was the status of women, the power of love, ethical behavior, and the tender relations between lovers. Without love and the cultivation of love, she believed, an ideal and just society could not exist." Indeed, the gatherings she hosted and the countercultural fairy tales she nurtured among other gifted women in her circle "created an atmosphere in the salons in which they could freely exchange ideas that challenged the hypocrisy and immorality of King Louis XIV's court" and allowed them, through "their strange metaphorical language and codes, filled with hyperbole and euphemisms.[to] create utopian narratives in opposition to the status quo" that "present a woman's viewpoint on such topics as tender love, fidelity, courtship, honor, and arranged marriages." In Madame d'Aulnoy's fairy tales, fairies both good and evil enforce the courtly rules of love, both heroes and heroines wed animal brides and grooms, beauty and ugliness are constantly in flux, radical transformation is a regular occurrence, and happily ever afters aren't to be taken for granted, but often hard won by heroines who have survived and surmounted otherworldly obstacles. This 1898 edition, with its chivalrous cover designed by the great Walter Crane, holds 24 spellbinding, fierce, and proto-feminist fairy tales from the woman who coined the term itself, without her "moralising verses," here illustrated in dreamy vignettes by Clinton Peters and introduced by Anne Thackeray Ritchie (18371919), essayist, novelist, biographer, and eldest daughter of William Makepeace Thackeray, who penned her own subversive fairy tales exploring the social, political, and gender issues of her time in Bluebeard's Keys (1874), including a retelling of d'Aulnoy's "The White Cat." 8 1/2" X 6 7/8". xxi, 535pp. Bound in very pale blue-tinged cloth over boards, with Walter Crane illustration of a knight astride his noble steed, peering up at a vision of his lady's face within an initial, stamped in dark brown to upper board, lettered in kind, with a dragon holding a banner stamped in dark brown to spine, lettered in gilt. Moderate wear to binding, with open tears to bumped corners, small neat tears to head and tail of spine, light scattered rubbing and faint soiling to cloth, and dimming and dulling to decoration and lettering on spine. Hint of previous cracking and glue repair to inner hinge; rear hinge a touch tender. Binding remains quite firm and sound. Previous owner's name to front free endpaper. Toning to endpapers and occasional light foxing to pages throughout, else unmarked. Illustrated throughout in vignettes by Clinton Peters. This edition does not include translations of the original moralizing verses with which d'Aulnoy concluded her fairy tales. New Edition, with Additional Illustrations.