When the Grimm brothers resurrected the genre in the mid-1800s, fairy tales and folktales had been mostly ignored by the literary establishment for the previous century. But, as we learned in our discussion of “The White Cat,” the Grimms were not the first ones in history to recognize both the literary merit and the potential power of these culturally significant forms of storytelling.
Travel back a little further, and you’ll find an even earlier period where fairy tales experienced a flurry of attention among the literary and intellectual elite in Europe. In the mid-sixteenth century, the Italian poet Gianfrancesco Straparola published a collection of 75 subversive and salacious fairy tales. This collection, which is believed to be the first written volume of fairy tales published in Europe, was eventually banned.

But Straparola’s work was rediscovered almost a century later, inspiring another Italian author, Giambattista Basile. Basile put together his own collection of 50 fairy tales, The Pentamerone. This time, the Italian fairy tale collector sparked a fad, kicking off nearly a century of obsession with fairy tales. This period saw the proliferation of published volumes of fables and fairy tales, but also the transformation of the genre. This included the tales published by the conteuses – the group of women authors who took the fairy tale industry by storm – as well as Jean de la Fontaine, Charles Perrault, and others.
As we’ve seen in “The White Cat,” authors of fairy tales in the seventeenth century wanted to play with the didactic nature of the fairy tale and fable. Stories that were intended to hide a real-world lesson under the veneer of a fantastical tale seemed to be the perfect vehicles for satire, and one of the reasons fairy tales gained so much traction in this time period is because they weren’t just for kids anymore. Like a good Pixar film, many of the fairy tales written during this time featured fun stories that children would love, but in the background carried messages of social and political critique that were meant for adults.
There was also a distinct effort to shed the folksy roots of these stories, and transform them into “high literature.” Most of the people who promoted the fairy tale craze during this period were social elites. (One reason the fairy tales we know today, many of which were first popularized during this time, so often feature royal or noble characters, may be due to the fact that their early influential authors were writing about–and critiquing–their own social world, aristocratic society.) Most of these stories were not, or at least not completely, the product of the author’s artistic imagination, but were based on ancient myths or folktales; yet, the authors of the time believed that fairy tales needed to be legitimized with elevated language and sophisticated themes.

Case in point: Charles Perrault served in the ministry of finance in the court of King Louis XIV of France. Influenced by the work of Basile, after he retired at the age of 69 he decided to rewrite a number of earlier folktales and fairy tales for an aristocratic audience. His new adaptations of these tales were tremendously popular during his life, and hugely influential afterwards. In a sense, Perrault created the modern concept of the fairy tale, along with inventing its personification: in 1697, Perrault published  Stories from long ago, or, Tales of Mother Goose  (Histoires ou contes du temps passé, ou, Les Contes de ma mère l’oye), introducing to the world the feathered fabulist who would adorn the covers of children’s books for the next 300+ years.