The introduction also situates Villeneuve and her works in relation to the broader literary field. We learn that Villeneuve and Crébillon had a particular affinity for animals, which they continually rescued, a detail that can inform Villeneuve's attachment to animal characters in her tales. After discussing her family background and marriage gone bad, Wolfgang follows Villeneuve's move to Paris, where she supports herself as a writer and meets dramatist and royal censor Prosper Jolyot de Crébillon, with whom she will cohabit until her death in 1755. This detail becomes particularly important when considering the frame narrative of "Beauty and the Beast." This frame narrative concerns two family friends, Doriancourt and Robercourt, the latter of whom makes his fortune in the French colony at Saint-Domingue. From a noble Protestant family from La Rochelle, Villeneuve's relatives included Jean Barbot, who was engaged in the transatlantic slave trade and about which he wrote. It opens with an overview of Villeneuve's life and networks of relations.
The introduction contains a wealth of information that grounds the tale within the broad context of eighteenth-century French society. The translation is beautifully wrought and is supported by a 72-page introduction, as well as numerous footnotes that make accessible to English readers and non-early-modern students and scholars the complex world and the position of Villeneuve within it that gave rise to the only tale within our contemporary fairy-tale canon penned solely by women, "Beauty and the Beast." Appearing in the Other Voice series, which seeks to restore the voices of early modern women, Villeneuve's Beauty and the Beast is a welcome addition to the series. Neither Zipes nor Planché reproduced for English readers the tale's dedication, preface, or frame narrative about "The Young American Girl" on her way back to Hispaniola after living for years in France, which inform the context and meaning of the tale. Planché's nineteenth-century translation in which erotic passages were eliminated. Although Jack Zipes includes a translation of this first recognizable version of "Beauty and the Beast" in Beauties, Beasts, and Enchantments: Classic French Fairy Tales, first published in 1989, Zipes's translation is based on J. As Aurora Wolfgang notes in the introduction to her new translation of Gabrielle-Suzanne Barbot de Villeneuve's Beauty and the Beast, this is the first integral English translation of the novella-length tale from 1740.
0 kommentar(er)
