When Dreams Came True: Classical Fairy Tales and Their Tradition - Hardcover

Zipes, Jack

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0415980062 ISBN 13: 9780415980067

Publisher: Routledge, 2007

Synopsis

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?

In When Dreams Came True, Jack Zipes explains the social life of the fairy tale, from the sixteenth century on into the twenty-first. Whether exploring Charles Perrault or the Brothers Grimm, Hans Christian Andersen or The Thousand and One Nights, The Happy Prince or Pinocchio, L. Frank Baum or Hermann Hesse, Zipes shows how the authors of our beloved fairy tales used the genre to articulate personal desires, political views, and aesthetic preferences within particular social contexts. Above all, he demonstrates 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.

This second edition of one of Jack Zipes’s best-loved books includes a new preface and two new chapters on J.M. Barrie’s Peter Pan and E.T.A. Hoffman’s The Nutcracker and the Mouse King.

About this title

About the Author:

Jack Zipes is Professor of German at the University of Minnesota. An acclaimed translator and scholar of children's literature, his most recent books include Why Fairy Tales Stick, Hans Christian Andersen: The Misunderstood Storyteller, Beautiful Angiola, and The Robber with the Witch's Head, all published by Routledge.

From Kirkus Reviews:

paper 0-415-92151-1 Zipes (German/Univ. of Minnesota; Dont Bet on the Prince, 1986, etc.), a childrens literature specialist, here gathers together his introductions and postscripts from various previous fairy tale collections. The result is a concise yet comprehensive picture of the genres development in Western Europe and America since the 1600s. Fairy tales thrived as an oral tradition for centuries before they were transcribed. Zipes argues that early tales didnt target a juvenile audience; instead, their allegorical form often concealed social, moral, ethical, and aesthetic criticism appreciated only by adults. The pioneer of the genre in France was Charles Perrault, who created fairy tales drawing on pagan beliefs and folklore, rather than on antique sources, as the classicist canon of his time preferred. In Germany, Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm charged their tales with Protestant ethics, while Hans Christian Andersen negotiated power relations and social domination in Danish society. Due to religious austerity, fairy tales were suppressed in England until the middle of the 19th century. After they entered literature officially during the Victorian Age, they exhibited a strong didactic tendency, and eventually took shape as an implicit critical inquiry into the dominant materialist culture, the oppressive moral code, or, as in the case of Oscar Wilde, normative sexuality. Among American fairy tale writers, Zipes focuses particularly on Frank Baum, whose multivolume work on the utopian land of Oz became a fixture of the cultural landscape, embodying the author's dream of a socialist alternative to American capitalism. Zipes skillfully weaves into his narrative the story of the influence of the Arabian Nights, translations of which began to appear in the West as early as the 1700s. At the close of his study, he also looks briefly at how the 20th-century German novelist Hermann Hesse infused the classical fairy tale with the macabre and romantic realism to reflect his personal journey and European political conflicts. An enticing reexamination of cherished texts. (15 illustrations) (Author tour) -- Copyright ©1998, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.

About this edition

• Publisher: Routledge
• Publication date: 2007
• ISBN 10: 0415980062
• ISBN 13: 9780415980067
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 336