Tales of Bluebeard and His Wives from Late Antiquity to Postmodern Times

Download or read book Tales of Bluebeard and His Wives from Late Antiquity to Postmodern Times written by Shuli Barzilai and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2013-01-11 with total page 206 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This project provides an in-depth study of narratives about Bluebeard and his wives, or narratives with identifiable Bluebeard motifs, and the intertextual and extratextual personal, political, literary, and sociocultural factors that have made the tale a particularly fertile ground for an author’s adaptation of the story. Whereas Charles Dickens, for example, expresses a sympathetic identification with Bluebeard, and a discernable strain of misogyny emerges in his recreation of the tale and recurrent allusions to it, his contemporary, William Makepeace Thackeray, uses the tale as a springboard for his critique of avarice, hypocrisy, pretension, and the subjugation of women in Victorian society.