Abstract
The evolution of the literary status of fairy tales post-dates the very evolution of print production and publishing. From the end of the 16th century, simplified texts with a popular appeal began to proliferate. When publishing became industrialized, books were peddled and their low price made them accessible to children. Books that could be used by children thus pre-existed literature specifically designed for them.
The first major book of imaginative literature in French written specifically for children was Fénelon's Les Aventures de Télémaquein 1699 , but this did not prevent this children's story from being read by adults as a text with adult stakes. In his Télémaque, a kind of fan fiction that slips into the interstices of theOdyssey, Fénelon sets up a kind of erotics of the novel : it's desire that creates fiction. In the 18th century, the idea began to take hold that the function of literature is to create another world, open to escape, and that this is not its weakness, astraditional critics of the novelhad been claiming since the 16th century, but its strength.
Witness Goethe's evocation of his childhood reading in Poetry and Truth, or Dickens' later David Copperfield. A young German from the 18th century and a young Frenchman read more or less the same texts : a common popular literature travels across Europe. Childhood reading became a commonplace of autobiographical narrative. Gaston Bachelard says it best :" all our life is reading ". To read is to enter into the mechanism of personal development. Through the written word, the child learns to fix states and find his or her place in memory and time.
