Seeing Through the Mother Goose Tales

• Introduction Part I. Turns of Mind: Perraldian Compromises: 1. The Cartesian turn: Perrault against Descartes 2. The sublime turn: Perrault against Boileau 3. The preteritional turn: Perrault against Racine Part II. Returns of Compromise: Perrault's Tales of Ogres: 4. Food for sight 5. The Ogre's Genesis 6. Bluebeard's secret Conclusion: the end in sight Appendix Notes Bibliography Index.

"Lewis's reading of Perrault is informed by a deep knowledge of seventeenth-century French culture, ideology, and aesthetic theories as well as a particularly astute grasp of contemporary theoretical discourses. . . . We are finally given the extraordinarily complex workings of stories that for almost 300 years have been relegated to the domain of 'children's' literature."—Mitchell Greenberg, Miami University "A powerful new vision of 17th-century literary and intellectual history. . . . Lewis has very much changed the way we will teach these tales and French classicism in general."—John D. Lyons, University of Virginia