Gretchen Schultz – författare

The wolf is tricked by Red Riding Hood into strangling her grandmother and is subsequently arrested. Sleeping Beauty and Cinderella do not live happily ever after. And the fairies are saucy, angry, and capricious. Fairy Tales for the Disillusioned collects thirty-six tales, many newly translated, by writers associated with the decadent literary movement, which flourished in France in the late nineteenth century. Written by such creative luminaries as Charles Baudelaire, Anatole France, and Guillaume Apollinaire, these enchanting yet troubling stories reflect the concerns and fascinations of a time of great political, social, and cultural change. Recasting well-known favorites from classic French fairy tales, as well as Arthurian legends and English and German tales, the updated interpretations in this collection allow for more perverse settings and disillusioned perspectives--a trademark style and ethos of the decadent tradition. In these stories, characters puncture the optimism of the naive, talismans don't work, and the most deserving don't always get the best rewards.The fairies are commonly victims of modern cynicism and technological advancement, but just as often are dangerous creatures corrupted by contemporary society. The collection underlines such decadent themes as the decline of civilization, the degeneration of magic and the unreal, gender confusion, and the incursion of the industrial. The volume editors provide an informative introduction, biographical notes for each author, and explanatory notes throughout. Subverting the conventions of the traditional fairy tale, these old tales made new will entertain and startle even the most disenchanted readers.

A new collection of subversive French fairy talesThe wolf is tricked by Red Riding Hood into strangling her grandmother and is subsequently arrested. Sleeping Beauty and Cinderella do not live happily ever after. And the fairies are saucy, angry, and capricious. Fairy Tales for the Disillusioned collects thirty-six tales, most newly translated, by writers associated with the decadent literary movement that flourished in late nineteenth-century France. These enchanting yet troubling stories reflect the concerns and fascinations of a time of great political, social, and cultural change. Recasting well-known favorites from classic French fairy tales, as well as Arthurian legends and English and German tales, these decadent fairy tales feature perverse settings and disillusioned perspectives, underlining such themes as the decline of civilization, the degeneration of magic and the unreal, gender confusion, and the incursion of the industrial. Complete with an informative introduction, biographical notes for each author, and explanatory notes throughout, these subversive tales will entertain and startle even the most disenchanted readers.

Literature that explored female homosexuality flourished in late nineteenth-century France. Poets, novelists, and pornographers, whether Symbolists, Realists, or Decadents, were all part of this literary moment. In Sapphic Fathers, Gretchen Schultz explores how these male writers and their readers took lesbianism as a cipher for apprehensions about sex and gender during a time of social and political upheaval.Tracing this phenomenon through poetry (Baudelaire, Verlaine), erotica and the popular novel (Belot), and literary fiction (Zola, Maupassant, PÉladan, MendÈs), and into scientific treatises, Schultz demonstrates that the literary discourse on lesbianism became the basis for the scientific and medical understanding of female same-sex desire in France. She also shows that the cumulative impact of this discourse left tangible traces that lasted well beyond nineteenth-century France, persisting into twentieth-century America to become the basis of lesbian pulp fiction after the Second World War.

The Gendered Lyric argues that gender difference contributes to the definition of aesthetic values and, indeed, shaped the representation of masculine and feminine subjectivity in nineteenth-century French poetry. Gretchen Schultz analyzes works by the leaders of the Romantic, Parnassian, and Symbolist schools to show that their implicit conceptions of gender were central to the formulation of their aesthetics. Prominent Romantic poets (Hugo, Lamartine, Musset) appropriated feminine cultural attributes to construct an empathetic male poet, while the Parnassians of the following generation, including Leconte de Lisle and Gautier, repudiated Romanticism for a more "muscular" and masculinist poetic practice. Women poets writing in the shadows of these great men devised varying strategies, ranging from assimilation to satire, to gain access to poetic subjectivity. Schultz devotes chapters to the Romantic Desbordes-Valmore, as well as several lesser-known Parnassian women, and through close readings explores their accommodations of, and revolts against, the dominant movements. Schultz's appendix of works by women poets provides the reader with a valuable source of heretofore unavailable texts. Symbolists readmitted femininity with a broader, more fluid definition of lyric subjectivity. Even the notoriously misogynist Bauldelaire contributed to the representation of otherness. And in different ways, Verlaine's gay male poetry and Marie Krysinska's innovative free verse battled poetic conventions to fulfill the promises of Symbolism's open poetic stance. The Gendered Lyric is recommended for scholars and students of nineteenth-century French studies, poetry and poetics, and gender studies.