ABSTRACT
The seven original fairy tales in the 1905 collection entitled L'ultima fata by "Cordelia" link femininity to abundance and domesticity. Italian does not have a gender-neutral word for "child". Fairy tales, as well as realism, were harnessed by writers of the period to engender proper subjects. The post-unification period saw a surge in research on local folklore, undertaken by scholars such as Giuseppe Pitre working in Sicily. The use of fairy tales as children's literature is itself to some extent a product of recapitulationist thinking. Many of Cordelia's tales seem to offer a kind of parallelism between boys and girls through pairings of a brother and sister, husband and wife, and, in one story, a male-female pair of villains. Through oblique invocations of contemporary Italian events, Cordelia harnesses the timeless fairy tale genre to concrete political anxieties, using the genre as a vehicle to resist modernity and imaginatively to arrest this kind of historical development.
