Fairy Tales for the Disillusioned Quotes

“Decadents looked to Charles Baudelaire, author of The Flowers of Evil (1857), as an important influence. He described his aesthetic project as an alchemical process of extracting beauty from evil.”
― Gretchen Schultz, Fairy Tales for the Disillusioned: Enchanted Stories from the French Decadent Tradition

“there are no good fairies: the bad ones killed them off long ago.”
― Gretchen Schultz, Fairy Tales for the Disillusioned: Enchanted Stories from the French Decadent Tradition

“The depiction of bad fairies, or bad magic, also illuminates the sexual politics of the decadent moment, which was shaped by the postwar crisis of masculinity.9 Just as the prominence of the femme fatale in decadent literature reflected this fin-de-siècle crisis, so did the fatal fairy reflect male anxiety about the dangers of female sexuality.”
― Gretchen Schultz, Fairy Tales for the Disillusioned: Enchanted Stories from the French Decadent Tradition

“the wittier the man, the more artless and tedious his tales”
― Gretchen Schultz, Fairy Tales for the Disillusioned: Enchanted Stories from the French Decadent Tradition

“men and women had become too wise to require the help of a little fairy.”
― Gretchen Schultz, Fairy Tales for the Disillusioned: Enchanted Stories from the French Decadent Tradition

“Fairies were dying off in the nineteenth century…. Their movements became languid in a fever of erudition and philosophy.”
― Gretchen Schultz, Fairy Tales for the Disillusioned: Enchanted Stories from the French Decadent Tradition