Here’s a review of a fascinating-looking new collection of fairy tales by French decadent writers around the fin de siècle. The editors say
Nearly a century before postmodern fairytales by Margaret Atwood, AS Byatt, Angela Carter and others upend fairytale stereotypes about gender and sexuality, decadent writers created female characters unlike the virginal beauties of the classic tales, and exposed the romantic myths associated with the genre
It seems unlikely that Angela Carter was influenced directly by these tales but it’s interesting to note that the title story of The Bloody Chamber is itself coloured by a Decadent mentality, drawing on and referencing writers and artists such as Baudelaire.
