Until relatively recently, Villeneuve's tale has also been largely overlooked or dismissed by fairy tale scholars, perhaps primarily due to its length, sophisticated plot, and intended audience. However, it would eventually be overshadowed in the minds of the general public by its heavily abridged adaptation for children, published in 1756 by Jeanne-Marie Le Prince de Beaumont. It enjoyed immediate success and enhanced its author's renown in her native France during the eighteenth century. Villeneuve's novella-length work, containing multiple digressions, references to contemporary society, and mild eroticism, targeted an audience of adults. Though the story's literary antecedents can be traced back as far as the second century, to the tale of "Cupid and Psyche" as it appears in Lucius Apuleius's The Golden Ass, the first version of the tale that would be readily recognizable to a modern audience is Gabrielle-Suzanne Barbot Gaalon de Villeneuve's "La Belle et la Bête" (1740).
"Beauty and the Beast" is one of the most popular and well-known fairy tales in Western culture. Villeneuve's "La belle et la bête" (1740) : an annotated edition in English.Įverett_rochester_0188E_11320.pdf 1.51 MB (No.
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