Out of the Woods studies the birth and early evolution of the literary fairy tale in Italy and France in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, from the early Italian collections (Straparola and Basile), through the "first wave" of fairy tale production in the France of Louis XIV (Perrault and d'Aulnoy), up to later eighteenth-century manipulations and transformations (Hamilton, Gozzi, Casanova).

The tales analyzed here were appropriated from the oral tradition and transformed by professional men and women of letters into sophisticated literary creations for an elite audience of court and salon frequenters. Thus, far from being minor works or "entertainment for little ones," these fantastic tales contributed to an interrogation and revision of the cultural history of their times, offering new paradigms of narrative representation and social interaction.