The Tale of Bluebeard in German Literature From the Eighteenth Century to the Present

Bluebeard', in which women are slaughtered by a monstrous husband and their bodies hidden in a horrible chamber, is the most hair-raising of tales; yet with its happy ending, it also has a utopian force. Using the idiom of literary criticism, the study considers Bluebeard texts as a seismograph of gender politics and of the process of civilization from seventeenth-century France to 1990s Germany, in a broad range of canonical and non-canonical, often forgotten texts. The study discusses Charles Perrault's French version of 1697, through Ludwig Tieck's versions of 1797 and classic versions by the Grimms and Ludwig Bechstein, to nineteenth-century romantic fiction, the savagery of High Modernism, and twentieth-century versions such as that of the Surrealist Unica Zürn. While the focus is on literature in German, this is the first full-length study published in any language of the history of Bluebeard, and it redefines the canon and our interpretations of this key tale.

1 - Unendliche Geschichte? Reading Märchen
2 - Bluebeard - A Subversive Narrative. Some Theoretical Ideas
3 - Narratives of Origin
4 - The Moral(s) of the Story: Early Versions of 'Blaubart'
5 - The Collector: E. Marlitt, 'Blaubart'
6 - 'Der gute Blaubart': Bluebeard at the Turn of the Century
7 - 'Ich . . . verleiss das Haus in Morgengrauen': Bluebeard in the Later Twentieth Century
8 - Blaubarts Schatten: Some Conclusions