RLFR 220
Fairy Tales: Love and Politics at the Sun King's Court Spring 2019
Division I
This is not the current course catalog

This course explores the literary and historical development of love and politics in 17th-century France. These two motifs dominated courtly life at Versailles during the reign of Louis XIV, the Sun King. Since cultural and artistic creations tend to dialogue with social circumstances, the literature of this time period—which critics have sometimes called the “Grand Siècle”—develops different schools of thought on the interactions between politics and love. Some authors approached these interactions from an idealistic or innocent perspective, while others had a more pessimistic or realistic outlook. Together, we will examine why and how each trajectory formed while also investigating the roles of literary genre and authorial gender. As part of our explorations, students will compose their own, original fairy tales and will also adapt a written tale into an in-class theatrical performance. Conducted in French.