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Contes en réseaux: l'émergence du conte sur la scène littéraire européenne. By Patricia Eichel-Lojkine. Geneva: Droz, 2013. 457 pp.
In her substantial book, Patricia Eichel-Lojkine offers a detailed and wellresearched analysis of the Italian tales of Straparola and Basile and of the French tales of Perrault and d'Aulnoy in light of earlier roots, such as medieval romances, Oriental sources, and even Yiddish storylines.
In the introduction the author announces that "once upon more than one time" would be the most suitable expression to qualify the genre (10). Indeed, Contes en réseaux, composed of three parts, proposes to revisit the European tales that we know and to consider their multiple transformations and migrations since their origins. The fairy tale is a developing and migrating genre (42).
The first part of the book with its three chapters is "Rémanences," in reference to Foucault's Ľarchéologie du savoir (1969). Its main purpose is to highlight the cultural interaction between the various versions of the same tale from diverse Western and Eastern traditions, whether Christian or nonChristian. Chapter 1 brings to light these networks between tales, leading to the conclusion that the identity of the written tales results from several factors involving a network of circulation and cultural transfers (43). Eichel-Lojkine states that the tales emanate from a process of multiple transformations and interactions; they exchange their former function to acquire a new one,...