La remise en cause du merveilleux comme source d’avatars du «Roi grenouille» dans la littérature de jeunesse et au-delà.

Abstract

If the reader adopts the narrative pact offered by fairy tales, then hearing animals talking will be no more surprising than seeing an amphibian morphing into a prince as in the Brothers Grimm’s ‘The Frog Prince’. The metamorphosis of the animal takes place – as anyone will swear from what they think they remember clearly – after a kiss from the princess. However, though there was not a hint of this happening in the original tale, posterity raised the kiss to the rank of a myth, which brought about – through reversals, mutations, transpositions, rephrasing and multiple rewriting – a good deal of avatars, mainly in youth literature but also in the most diverse and unexpected areas. By studying a few examples, we intend to show how those new versions, while relying on magic, make fun of it within a framework where reality and fiction often intertwine. Might the purpose of it all be to enlighten a supposedly naive reader by belittling the universe of fairy tales, or rather, lighten their mood by using a shared image that has turned into a cultural reference embedded in our collective memory?
Key words: Rewriting; intertextuality; magic; metamorphosis; humor.