When Dreams Came True
Classical Fairy Tales and Their Tradition
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- $59.99
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- $59.99
Publisher Description
For centuries fairy tales have been a powerful mode of passing cultural values onto our children, and for many these stories delight and haunt us from cradle to grave. But how have these stories become so powerful and why? Until now we have lacked a social history of the fairy tale to frame our understanding of the role it plays in our lives. With the publication of When Dreams Came True, Jack Zipes fills this gap and shifts his focus to the social and historical roots of the classical tales. With coverage of the most significant writers and their works in Europe and North America from the sixteenth century to the beginning of the twentieth century, When Dreams Came True is another important contribution by the master of fairy tales. From the French Charles Perrault to the American L. Frank Baum and the German Hermann Hesse, Zipes explores the way in which particular authors used the genre of the fairy tale to articulate their personal desires, political views and aesthetic preferences in their particular social context. At the core of this magical tour through the history of the fairy tale is Zipes' desire to elucidate the role that the fairy tale has assumed in the civilizing process--the way it imparts values, norms and aesthetic taste to children and adults. His journey takes us to the familiar and the exotic in the great classical tales by Perrault, the Brothers Grimm, and Hans Christian Andersen and in such fascinating works as Pinocchio, The Thousand and One Nights, The Happy Prince and The Wonderful Wizard of Oz. Throughout, Zipes reveals the historical dimensions of the tales and demonstrates their continuing relevance in our lives today.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Since publishing Don't Bet on the Prince a decade ago, Zipes has established himself as the preeminent popularizer of the social and psychological uses of fairy tales for a contemporary audience. The 11 essays collected here are revised and updated introductions and afterwords written by Zipes for his books dealing with fairy and folk literature. His aim in updating and reissuing this material is to highlight the historical role that fairy tales, both oral and written, play in socializing and civilizing their audience. Backed by scholarly research and cross-cultural references, the essays describe how a privileged, educated minority has used fairy tales to defend and maintain its status while incorporating and perpetuating the belief that the poor could triumph over the ruling class through cunning and moral integrity. Zipes's main thesis is that fairy tales are a dynamic mixture of upper- and lower-class values that at once reinforce a society's class structure and, with subtlety and humor, show the emperor's nakedness without upsetting the status quo. The chapters on fairy tale creators Hans Christian Andersen, Oscar Wilde, Herman Hesse and Americans Frank Stockton and L. Frank Baum connect these writers' outsider status with their use of the fairy tale to explore nonconformism and to voice their opposition to hypocrisy, commercialism and war. Of primary interest to students of children's literature, the book may also appeal to readers concerned with social history, although the links between these disparate pieces are not as solidly forged as they might have been had Zipes written a single cohesive study of the subject.
