Fays of the Sea and Other Fantasies

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The 20 stories collected in the present volume, all written during the 19th century, may not be real contes de fees, in the sense of the classic works of the Comtesse de Murat and Madame d'Aulnoy, but they do retain conscious echoes of the originals, and despite the interference in the genre’s subsequent history, they maintain residues of the same spirit as well as fragments of imagery.

Some writers developed the more broadly comic aspect of the genre; others created authentic folkloristic materials in a semi-reverent manner, while maintaining a certain contemporary relevance. Finally, a few managed to take the reborn genre of contes de fees to new extreme of symbolist fantasies in the pages of newspapers.

Taken together, these stories are a belated testament to the enterprise and creativity of their distinguished predecessors of the 1690s.