Piercing the Magic Veil

This study investigates the conte merveilleux both as a 17th-century narrative genre and as a subject of 20th-century critical scholarship. The author's examination of the generic, sociocultural, historical, structural, narratological, semiotic, and psychological dimensions of fairy tales proposes a multidisciplinary approach to the genre. By showing how Perrault and his contemporaries constructed the genre of conte merveilleux and promoted the narratives to an object with far-reaching ramifications for centuries to come, he argues that the tales are largely predicated on the concept of conte defined in late 17th-century France.