C. E. Hermansson, Bluebeard: A Reader's Guide to the English Tradition - Comparative and World Literature

French Literature Reviews - 2026

C. E. Hermansson, Bluebeard: A Reader's Guide to the English Tradition
Comparative and World Literature

Bluebeard. A Reader's Guide to the English Tradition

Casie E. Hermansson

USA: University Press of Mississippi, 2009, 304 p.

  • 978-1-60473-230-6 Unjacketed cloth $60.00S
  • 978-1-60473-231-3 Paper $30.00S
  • Excerpts online (books.google.fr)

Publisher's overview:

A study of the ever-evolving fairy tale about the murderous aristocrat and his endangered wife.

Bluebeard is the main character in one of the grisliest and most enduring fairy tales of all time. A serial wife murderer, he keeps a horror chamber in which the remains of all his previous matrimonial victims are secreted from his latest bride. She is given all the keys but forbidden to open one door of the castle. Astonishingly, this fairy tale was a nursery room staple, one of the tales translated into English from Charles Perrault's French Mother Goose Tales.

Bluebeard: A Reader's Guide to the English Tradition is the first major study of the tale and its many variants (some, like "Mr. Fox," native to England and America) in English: from the eighteenth- and nineteenth-century chapbooks, children's toy books, pantomimes, melodramas, and circus spectaculars, through the twentieth century in music, literature, art, film, and theater.

Chronicling the story's permutations, the book presents examples of English true-crime figures, male and female, called Bluebeards, from King Henry VIII to present-day examples. Bluebeard explores rare chapbooks and their illustrations and the English transformation of Bluebeard into a scimitar-wielding Turkish tyrant in a massively influential melodramatic spectacle in 1798. Following the killer's trail over the years, Casie E. Hermansson looks at the impact of nineteenth-century translations into English of the German fairy tales of the Brothers Grimm, and the particularly English story of how Bluebeard came to be known as a pirate. This book will provide readers and scholars an invaluable and thorough grasp of the many strands of this tale over centuries of telling.

Casie E. Hermansson is an associate professor of English at Pittsburg State University. Author of Reading Feminist Intertextuality through Bluebeard Stories, she has also published in the University of Toronto Quarterly, Papers on Language and Literature, Studies in American Fiction, and the International Journal of the Humanities.

304 pages (approx.), 6 x 9 inches, 16 color and 14 b&w illustrations, bibliography, index

The figure of the murderous aristocrat who forbids his young wife to open a single door in his castle originates in Charles Perrault's classic French collection of fairy tales. Over subsequent centuries, this narrative migrated across borders, adapting readily to diverse media ranging from early children's chapbooks to theatrical melodrama and modern cinema. In the English-speaking world, the motif generated numerous variants, native equivalents, and artistic interpretations, demonstrating a remarkable capacity for cultural reinvention across generations of readers and audiences alike.

Casie E. Hermansson examines the transmission and transformation of this story through various historical periods and cultural formats, charting its evolution in chapbooks, pantomimes, music, art, and literature. The volume addresses English true-crime figures associated with the trope, the influence of nineteenth-century German folklore translations, and the adaptation of the character into a pirate figure within English tradition. Readers interested in fairy-tale studies, folklore, and cultural history may find this comprehensive guide relevant to their research into traditional narratives and their modern adaptations.