ABSTRACT
We have seen how, aer the debate about the pernicious nature of fairy tales in the eighteenth century and their harnessing by writers like Mme Le Prince de Beaumont and Mme de Genlis to a didactic purpose, the traditional merveilleux almost disappeared from new children’s books in the nineteenth century.1 In the twentieth century, however, writers turned once more to fairy tales, myths, and fantasy to express a variety of ideas, rewriting familiar tales or creating new ones in response to perceived contemporary needs or tastes or as a personal statement. In literature for adults, especially that written in English, fairy-tale themes and constructs have been reworked in order to explore and throw new light on political, social, racial, and gender issues and to encourage readers to look at their society’s beliefs in a dierent way. In children’s literature, too, a signicant shi in emphasis can be seen in the agenda informing the use of the merveilleux. Whereas the underlying aim is oen still moralistic and concerned with social or existential questions fairy tales have also become humorous and anarchic. Occasionally such tales are merely escapist, but many writers have employed fantasy not to shield children from reality, but, as Ganna Ottevaere-van Praag puts it, to ‘l’aider à découvrir sa vie intime ainsi que son entourage par le biais de la fantaisie et de l’humour, il veut lui faciliter l’accès au monde que chemin faisant il lui enseigne à critiquer sinon à contester’.2 e agenda is thus frequently not one of socialisation and the promotion of contemporary social and moral values but one of stimulating the young reader’s critical spirit to interrogate the assumptions and prejudices of the adult world and of the genre of the merveilleux itself. Such an innovative approach introduces a hitherto
extremely rare note of subversion into children’s books, one that goes hand-in-hand with a move towards a more child-centred literature. At the same time, traditional fairy stories, particularly the tales of Charles Perrault, have continued to appear in new editions and have successfully made the transition to comic strip, television, and lm (notably, those of Disney, which are known worldwide).
