SOURCE: Zuerner, Adrienne E. “Reflections on the Monarchy in d'Aulnoy's Belle-Belle ou le chevalier Fortuné.” In Out of the Woods: The Origins of the Literary Fairy Tale in Italy and France, edited by Nancy L. Canepa, pp. 194-217. Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1997.

In this essay, Zuerner considers d'Aulnoy's depiction of masculinity, focusing on the story of a cross-dressed girl in Belle-Belle ou le chevalier Fortuné.

One of the principal creators of the literary fairy tale in seventeenth-century France, Mme d'Aulnoy was one of the most read and appreciated writers during her lifetime.¹ Author of an impressive corpus of fairy tales, novels, and pseudomemoirs, admired and celebrated in the salon society of her day, the countess d'Aulnoy remained popular into the eighteenth century when numerous reprints of her tales appeared.² Relegated to critical obscurity for almost three centuries, d'Aulnoy's work now garners scholarly attention and serious appraisal. Yet...