Fairy-tale science

by Suzanne Magnanini

"In Fairy-Tale Science Suzanne Magnanini explores the birth and evolution of the literary fairy tale in the context of early modern discourses on the monstrous. She demonstrates how both the normative literary theories of the Italian intellectual establishment and the emerging New Science limited the genre's success on its native soil. Natural philosophers, physicians, and clergymen positioned the fairy tale in opposition to science, fixing it as a negative pole in a binary system, one which came to define both a new type of scientific inquiry and the nascent literary genre. Magnanini also suggests that, by identifying their literary production with the monstrous and the feminine, Straparola and Basile contributed to the marginalization of the new genre." "A wide-ranging yet carefully crafted study, Fairy-Tale Science investigates the complex interplay between scientific discourse and an emerging literary genre, and expands our understanding of the early modern European imagination."--