The Tale of Bluebeard in German Literature: From the Eighteenth Century to the Present
Mererid Puw Davies
Abstract
‘Bluebeard’, in which women are slaughtered by a monstrous husband and their bodies hidden in a horrible chamber, is the most hair-raising of tales; yet with its happy ending, it also has a utopian force. Using the idiom of literary criticism, this study considers Bluebeard texts as a seismograph of gender politics and of the process of civilization from 17th-century France to 1990s Germany, in a broad range of canonical and non-canonical, often forgotten texts. The study discusses Charles Perrault's French version of Bluebeard of 1697, through Ludwig Tieck's versions of 1797 and classic versi ... More
Keywords: Bluebeard, utopian force, gender politics, Charles Perrault, Ludwig Tieck, Brothers Grimm, Ludwig Bechstein, romantic fiction, High Modernism
Bibliographic Information
| Print publication date: 2001 | Print ISBN-13: 9780199242757 |
| Published to Oxford Scholarship Online: October 2011 | DOI:10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199242757.001.0001 |
